Why do Christian mystics say that all religions lead to God when the Bible says that Jesus is the only way?

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Mystics have more in common with each other than they do with followers of the faiths they ‘grew up’ in. This is because the path of meditative experience gets at the core fundamental essence of human experience. I’ve studied many mystics in my day, I’ve talked to many, and I’ve done lots of my own mysticism. These are my people, and I can recognize someone grappling with the mystery through the magic of direct divine experience from a mile away.

It’s all the same ‘stuff’ under the hood. There’s exactly one truth. You can comprehend pieces of it, but never the whole.

That said, each mystic has to make a decision about what piece of the mystery they want to plumb. This decision has inherent within it the notion that other parts aren’t quite as deserving of your time.

As my mystic practice grew over the years, my reliance on books has all but ceased. Why use books when you can just go to the source? But when I pick up the Bible and start reading, I immediately recognize the forms and themes that only the deeply mystical can devise.

These are people that didn’t just plumb the divine themselves, they shared these journeys with others, and when you share mysticism, the power of the experiences is multiplied rather than added. In this case, the power was so great it led to the creation of the greatest collection of literature known to man.

So how to explain the Biblical exhortation to only attempt to reach God through Jesus? These mystics surely knew the same truth that I stated above, that it’s all the same truth. Well, there are a few different ways to go about it, but they all revolve around the same idea.

The first approach is simple, they lied. Told a half truth deliberately for a purpose. Why would they do this? Well, think about the story that the Bible tells. God chooses a people who really don’t ever seem to deserve God’s favor. It occasionally feels as if the Isrealites don’t really want God around at all, what with how often they fall into idolatry and wickedness.

God’s chosen people need stern reminders of the fact that they are, in fact, God’s chosen people.

So the writers of the New Testament narrative, in line with the rest of the Hebrew Bible, carried on the tradition of a jealous God, just eschewing the murderous part, as that just didn’t seem relevant anymore.

Second, mystics know that not everybody is going to be a mystic. It requires deep deep trust in the divine. This trust has to be cultivated, to be chosen among sometimes seemingly better alternatives. A mystic experiences the world as a collection of pathways, bridges, to the divine, to that magic place in life where everything just works and God is ever-present. He’s constantly trying to build more, so as to invite more and more people to share in the gloriousness of divine presence.

The Bible is just one such pathway. Any pathway to the divine needs to chart it’s own course. The course constrains itself. Mysticism is all about finding meaning in the extremely small, and allowing things to find their own home. And that one thing being true doesn’t also mean that it’s opposite isn’t also true as well. Truth runs in lines and it’s also circular.

All that muddle of meaninglessness is to say is that the Bible saying Jesus is the only way is not necessarily incompatible with the idea that all religions also provide their own ways. It sounds like a contradiction, but God is not bound by your silly logics, mortal.