Is Jesus Christ the only way to God? This is a question the sharply divides Christians today.  I can think of at least four answers that Christians of various stripes honestly hold. I would term the four positions as: Exclusive, Pluralistic, Inclusive, and Normative. Each of them has a goal in relationships with folks who aren’t Christian. I invite you to reflect on where you stand.

Exclusive:

Jesus Christ is the Only Way, the Only Truth, the Only Light, the only path to God, to Salvation. The Exclusive answer has a hard and a softer version. The Hard Version: Without a Faith Relationship with Jesus you will not enter the Kingdom of God, be Saved, or avoid Hell and Damnation.  The Softer Version: Christianity is the only True Religion but God’s Love as revealed through Jesus may well include everyone and anyone as God chooses.  The Goal here with other people is Conversion

We all know the historical short comings of particularly the hard version of this position. Think intolerance, persecution and being a real downer at a party. On the other hand, historically people holding to the softer version of this position have historically often been the most committed resisters to injustice in the Christian community. The strongest Christian voices of opposition in Nazi Germany were mostly from this stance.  Open minded, culture affirming liberals usually caved.

Pluralistic:

There are many ways to God and Christian faith is only one of them. All the Religions lead to God. Jesus embodies the Way to God by dying to self and rising to Love, but that same way can be found in other religious traditions and even secular ways of life.

Polls tell us that this is now the view of majority of Americans. This view seeks to reject the damage done by Christians who have wielded power to advance the Exclusive position.  It affirms that truth and beauty are found universally in the human experience. The goal here is Acceptance of diversity. But to hold this position you probably have to gloss over real differences among the various religions and spirituality traditions which risks not taking any of them seriously enough.

Inclusive:

Jesus Christ is the Way and the Truth and the Light. He is God’s Love incarnate. Christians are those who follow him consciously and explicitly. But anyone who leads a life dedicated to self-giving love, to truth and justice and compassion is following Jesus’ way. Such folks are, as one theologian put it, “Anonymous Christians”.  This position was quite popular among progressive Christians a generation or two ago. The Goal here is helping people Recognize God in their own experience.

This position is on one hand sincerely affirming of non-Christians and at the same time it can be a little patronizing. Maybe by the same token good Christians could be seen as “Anonymous Buddhists” or “Anonymous Moslems”

Normative:

Jesus Christ is the Way, the Truth, and the Light for us.  Christ is the way in which we Christians have experienced the direct loving presence of God in our lives. Jesus is the Criteria by which we judge the rest of life, including all Christian and non-Christian religious claims. But we don’t possess a “God’s eye view of reality” so we have no way of knowing if all the Religions are in deep agreement; are just different roads up to the same mountain top or not.

It takes years of living inside a Faith Tradition to understand it. Each of us can only begin to comprehend the particular path we are on. The Goal here is Conversation. Our religious differences may be more interesting than our agreements. We can tell you about our Christian experience, but about Buddhism you’ll have to talk to a Buddhist, about Islam, talk to a Moslem, etc.

Okay, I guess you can kind of tell which one I like.

Peace,

Bryan

It seems to me there is two basic approaches the Truth the Church proclaims. They are not mutually exclusive and most of us practice our faith with some mixture of both. But for purposes of reflection they can be separated. The first sees the Christian Faith in terms of propositions the second sees the Christian Faith in terms of relationship.

In the first approach having faith means believing a series of statements about God and what God wants us to do. The Bible is seen as a kind of spiritual encyclopedia where you can find thousands of these statements.  Truth is this sense is a kind of once and for all, objective reality, like scientific facts. In this approach Truth is law.

In the second approach having faith means the process of knowing God and His ways through being in a loving relationship with him. Like all relationships of love, our understanding of the both of the God of ourselves changes over time. Hopefully our understanding broadens and deepens as the relationship transforms us. The Truth is revealed as something within us and between us. It is personal. The Bible has authority because, taken as a whole, it’s tell us the stories of the relationships lovingly establish by God with Israel and Jesus’ community – the Early Church. (Sometimes told in very different ways than the way we tell stories today.)  In both the stories, God is portrayed as reaching out to embrace people who the societies of the time deemed unimportant or unacceptable.  Those stories are the foundation given to us to guide our own journey to discover the kind of Truth which transforms us all by embracing all of us in this time and place.  In this approach Truth is grace.

Another way of putting all this is our faith proclaims that in Jesus Christ God is revealed as pure unbounded Love. In other words, for Christians, Love is the Truth.

And all of this, all which makes up our lives, is increasingly played out against the background of active and passive connections to an electronic reality. Through speakers and screens, large and small this reality fills the senses and minds with an exhilarating constant flow of sound and sights, images, graphics, story, all compelling our attention and demanding our response. Life’s relentless surface frenzy can obscure deeper human realities.

Still, often we do dip a little deeper into life. When we are fortunate enough to spend time with loved ones, when work or recreation overlaps with our life’s passions, or even when we feel the painful absence of love and passion from our days, doors to greater depth subtly swing open. But typically we spend so little time reflecting on the world about us and even less time in reflection on the worlds within us those opening doors go unnoticed.

This surface approach leads to viewing life only as a series of situations to be neatly managed, goals to be accomplished, and problems to be solved, or experiences to be fleetingly enjoyed. This in turn leads us to see ourselves only in simple terms like situation managers, goal chasers, problem solvers, and pleasure seekers. None of which is bad, all of which is just too limited.

Just too limited because we are deeper than that and our world is more profound than that. Life is not easily understood or easily managed. Because life offers both heartache and joy beyond comprehension, Life, above all, is a mystery. Our reality is a mystery, not in detective story sense of solving a question (who did it?), but in the sense of a reality larger than our ability to fully understand let alone manage or control. It is a reality that is always more question than answer, a reality than leads more to awe than to mastery. We only need to begin simply observing and reflecting to see the truth of this.

None of us remember our beginnings. None of us has memory of our birth. When we think back as far as we can, remembrance trails off into the fragments of our earliest recollections without ever reaching the trailhead of our personal journey.

In a different way we cannot actually imagine our endings either.  We contemplate our deaths by imagining them.  In our imaginations we watch ourselves die and in whatever way we imagine our deaths we continue. We usually imagine continuing in some afterlife but even if we imagine that we simply cease to exist, we still imagine observing the world continuing without us and in that observing we are still somehow there.

What ever we know or think we know objectively, subjectively we experience life as emerging from the mists beyond our memory and proceeding into the veil beyond our imaginings.  Down deep the life is a mystery to us.

We also are really alone and separate only in our imaginations, in the recesses of our own internal reflections. Only in modern western civilization have people conceived of their identities primarily as separate individuals. Who we are is a product of the relationships from which we have emerged. From the life sustaining nurture of our parents to the molding influence of our families to the guiding folkways of our villages and neighborhoods and the defining values of our nations and world-views of our cultures we emerge. Throughout life, all of us are formed and molded into who we are in webs of interconnected relationships with our fellow human beings.

Of course our connectedness runs even deeper. We can conceive ourselves as distinct from the physical universe, but we are seamlessly a part of it. We are physical and biological. As far as we actually know, we are the only part of the universe with brain functions that have become fully conscious. As far we know, only we can reflect on what we observed; only we form questions and concepts, beliefs and values. As far as we know only we can be awestruck by beauty, horrified by suffering, perplexed by paradox.  Only we search for meaning and sense purpose. We alone pray.

We know ourselves to be both completely part and uniquely distinct from the universe, related to all other life and aware in ways no other forms of life on this planet share, all at the same time. Our existence is mystery. And as far as we know in this whole wide universe, we are the only mysteries pondering mystery.

Out of our capacity to ponder and imagine our freedom emerges. We can pause and envision something else happening. We can choose to do something we have not done before. Imagining possibilities and picking among them, we can act in new ways.

The cumulative effect of all our free choices, and the choices of all those human beings that went before us has shape the human world in which we live. And that world is rack with contradictions. It is a world in which selfishness reigns yet love endures. We human beings are capable of deep compassion and deep cruelty.

Freedom and justice constantly contend against oppression and exploitation. Enormous wealth and extreme poverty exist side by side across the globe. Our great diversity of race, culture, gender, sexuality, and spirituality is more often a source of deadly conflict than a cause for celebration.

We continually choose to damage, distort and even destroy the web of relationships we need to live, be happy and be fulfilled. The mystery here is why? Why we do not simply always choose love and compassion over selfishness and cruelty? Why we can never seem to rid the world we shape of oppression and exploitation. Why do we all long for peace but cannot free ourselves of violence?  Our destructive choices are unnecessary, but the long course of human history shows them over and over again to be inevitable.

It is this persistent pattern of unnecessary, yet inevitable decisions against goodness that Christians mean by the word sin.

In the face of this unnecessary inevitability, atheists and agonistics ask how the mystery of evil can be explained.  Believers ask how the mystery of goodness can be accounted for.  The question for us all is how can we live in world gifted with beauty and wrack with pain?  How can we live in relationships in which we both cherish and wound one another?  How do we live in societies where welfare of people is both served and betrayed?

Is there any way in which we can comprehend the mysteries of our reality in ways that enable us to live authentically?

In that quest for authentic living, we are not alone. The human race has a companion on the journey. There is a presence always among us and within us, a companion whose mystery seems greater than our own. A mysterious companion we sometimes find in depths of imagination, freedom, relationships, pondering, reflection, and the passion of our lives. The Christian experience names this presence as the Spirit and recognizes this spiritual presence as the giver of life. This Spirit is among us and within us but wholly other than us, deeper than our depths, broader than our limitations, higher than our goodness and therefore Holy. The life giving Spirit within and among us but always deeper, broader and higher than us can only be understood as Holy.

Our world is permeated with the Holy Spirit. All human beings experience the power of the Spirit with every breath we take. We are most aware of the Spirit’s presence when we feel life at moments of intensity and depth. Moments when justice triumphs, when wounds and disease are healed, when our injury of others is forgiven, when we forgive the injuries done to us, when broken relationships are reconciled, when truth is revealed or beauty beheld, Whenever we are loved or love, whenever new life springs from the wreckage of death, that’s the presence and power of the Holy Spirit.

All the religions of humanity are responses to the Spirit’s presence and gifts. Much of art and literature, science and study are responses to the same Spirit. The Holy Spirit’s presence always offers to open us up and to draw us out into fuller, richer life.

The Holy Spirit leads us to the some implicit awareness or at least some unrecognized inkling that we are being addressed, touched, spoken to by a greater, deeper reality than ourselves. From the presence of the Holy Spirit the gifts of worship and prayer, faith and belief naturally flow.

In a multitude of forms and variations, both religious and non-religious, the experience of what we name Holy Spirit is a universal constituent part of being human.

The distinctive, normative Christian experience of the Holy Spirit is the experience of being led to and drawn into an encounter with Jesus Christ.

 Copyright 2011