ABSTRACT
The existence on planet Earth of a plurality of faiths and religious beliefs, many apparently irreconcilable with each other, is a fact. The matter of God’s existence is not a fact in the same sense, of course. Religions can be the object of empirical and phenomenological study in a way in which their object obviously cannot. Fortunately for me, however, this problem can be bracketed. I am an Anglican priest. This nails my colours firmly to the mast. My contribution is necessarily from a Christian religious perspective. But I am also a committed Islamophile – and not a little interested in Zen Buddhism too. I happen to believe that the religious diversities we discern in the shared world that we inhabit are expressions of a salutary, dynamic mystery – the same divine mystery in which believers rejoice and which they worship and seek to serve. I see no contradiction in connecting this mystery with the revealed, scriptural God who transcends the world and who is indeed also immanent in it. God the Creator pervades His creation; He is, I would like to put it, actively efficient in nature in innumerable ways, but He is eminently so through the agency of a key part of His creation: humanity. The selfsame God is also actively present and involved in the world through that rich mix, that variety of manifestations – practices, activities, rituals, and beliefs – which we all know as “religions”.
