"My religion is like no other."

One of the things I tend to notice Christians doing is trying to make Christianity "completely different" from everything else. I also seem to see some Orthodox Christians trying to do the same thing. There is actually a problem with this way of thinking.

Having something be "completely different" doesn't make it true. In fact, it may indeed lend credence to the idea that it is not true at all. There are many many ways that Christianity is very similar to other religions (and Orthodoxy to the rest of Christianity).

You can't go around basing your faith in Christ on the ability to hang on to a 'difference' between Christianity and something else. It just doesn't work. You have to hang on to Jesus...a living person...who is God. It's the only way.

Here are some examples of how 'Completely Different' thinking works:

• Some New Agers agree that the kingdom of God is within you. Some scholars, wanting Christianity to be 'completely different' from New Age thought, go to the Greek and decide that it says "among you' instead of 'in you'. Voila. Now we don't agree with the New Agers. However, we are now no longer in agreement with the Fathers.
• Someone makes a convincing argument as to why religion is bad. We want to be 'completely different' from other religions, so we claim that Christianity is not a religion.

This type of thinking has to stop. First of all, it ends up distorting the faith, because we keep feeling that in order to combat culture, we have to makes changes to the faith itself. Also, it causes us to be failures at evangelism because we end up developing a "view" of other religions and of Christianity that is distorted.

I don't know how many times people from other Christian churches had to correct my thinking when I first got on the internet and actually met people practicing those religions in chat rooms. I thought I had all the answers, having been raised in a smattering of Protestant churches (Methodist, Presbyterian, Baptist, Foursquare, non-denominational) and progressing through Roman Catholicism. I found out just how distorted my thinking really was.