Is Jesus the only way?

One confession, three answers

At the Last Supper Thomas asked about the way, and Jesus answered:

I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.

John 14:6

The apostles told the council, "Salvation exists in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved" (Acts 4:12), and Paul wrote that "there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus" (1 Timothy 2:5). Today, with neighbours of many faiths, the confession can sound narrow and proud. The answer to that charge is given in Is Jesus the only way? and Why Christianity and not another religion?; this lesson draws the map on which those answers stand. Since the 1980s theologians have commonly sorted Christian views of the religions into three: pluralism, inclusivism and exclusivism.

Pluralism and the elephant

Pluralism holds that the religions are different responses, each shaped by its own culture, to the one ultimate reality. None has the whole truth, and the change from self-centredness to a life centred on that reality happens in all the great traditions. Its best-known voice is John Hick, whom we met in The problem of evil and suffering; he called for a ‘Copernican revolution’ that would put God, not Christianity, at the centre. Its reasons carry weight: holy and good people are found in many religions, and which faith a person holds often depends on where they were born.

Pluralists like to tell an old Indian parable. Blind men touch an elephant: the one who holds the trunk says it is like a snake, the one who holds a leg says it is like a pillar, and they quarrel. So, it is said, each religion touches only part of the truth. But Christians ask: where does the teller of the story stand? He sees the whole elephant. The view that no religion sees the whole takes for itself the very place from which the whole is seen. Pluralists reply that theirs is a hypothesis to explain the variety of religions, and that the ultimate reality lies beyond all our words. Still, pluralism has to reread what the religions say of themselves: Hick read the incarnation as a metaphor. That is why the historic church has not accepted it. To set Jesus beside others as one way among many does not fit what he said of himself.

Inclusivism and exclusivism

Inclusivism and exclusivism both keep the church's old confession that Christ is the only Saviour. The Heidelberg Catechism asks why the Son of God is called Jesus, that is, Saviour, and answers:

Because he saves us from our sins; and no salvation is to be either sought or found in any other.

Heidelberg Catechism, Q. 29

Where the two part is whether one must know Christ in this life to be saved by him. Inclusivism holds that Christ saves by grace some who have never heard his name, as they respond to the light they have been given. The Catholic Church taught at the Second Vatican Council that people who have never come to know the gospel, and are not to blame for that, can be saved if they seek God with a sincere heart and, helped by his grace, try to live by his will as their conscience makes it known Lumen Gentium 16. John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, said of Cornelius that one who fears God and does what is right is accepted by him "Through Christ, though he knows him not" Wesley.

Exclusivism holds that salvation is through Christ and is ordinarily received by hearing the gospel and believing it: "faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of Christ" (Romans 10:17). Some prefer to call it particularism, to show that its focus is one particular person, Jesus, rather than shutting people out. The Reformed confessions and many evangelical churches, those that stress the authority of Scripture and the sharing of the gospel, hold this view, and the Lausanne Covenant of 1974 confessed that God makes himself known in nature, that this knowledge does not save, and that there is only one Saviour The Lausanne Covenant, 3. Critics of inclusivism note that God sent Peter to bring Cornelius a message by which he would be saved (Acts 11:14); critics of exclusivism ask whether it is fair to those who never heard.

What, then, of those who died without hearing the gospel? Paul says that what may be known about God has been made plain to all, though people suppress the truth (Romans 1:18-20), and also asks, "how can they believe in the One of whom they have not heard?" (Romans 10:14). Some hold that the gospel must be heard in this life; some point to Peter's words that "God does not show favoritism" (Acts 10:34) but welcomes those in every nation who fear him; some leave the answer with God. All hold to Abraham's question: "Will not the Judge of all the earth do what is right?" (Genesis 18:25). The question is taken up in What about those who never heard?

Before other religions

In Athens, a city full of idols, Paul began: "Men of Athens, I see that in every way you are very religious" (Acts 17:22). He started from an altar inscribed "TO AN UNKNOWN GOD" (Acts 17:23), and Wesley says he was "proclaiming to them an unknown, and yet not a new God" Wesley. In the second century Justin Martyr taught that the seeds of the Word are sown in all people, and wrote: "Whatever things were rightly said among all men, are the property of us Christians" Justin Martyr, Second Apology 13. So we can hear other religions as their followers state them, and gladly own whatever is true and good in them.

Yet we say honestly where the gospel differs. Many religions teach a path to walk and a discipline to practise, and many speak of mercy and forgiveness. The gospel says that the Son of God first came down and became man and died for sinners, and that God justifies us "freely by His grace" (Romans 3:24). Islam honours Jesus as a great prophet sent by God, but does not accept that he died on a cross. Paul wrote, "we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles" (1 Corinthians 1:23). As Matthew Henry puts it, "Christ crucified is the foundation of all our hopes, the fountain of all our joys" Matthew Henry.

In conversation, first learn what your friend believes, in your friend's own words. Then say that we walk this way not because we are better but because we have received grace. When many turned away, Peter confessed, "Lord, to whom would we go? You have the words of eternal life" (John 6:68). That is not an attack on other paths but a witness to where he found rest. The next lesson, Atheism and a secular society, turns to conversations in a society that lives without God.

Practice