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chapter_one.docxChapter One
IS JESUS THE ONLY SAVIOR?
Three conflicting answers to the question “Is Jesus the only Savior?” spark a debate that is dividing religious thinkers in the English-speaking world. This chapter explains the oldest of the three views, Christian exclusivism, the position that answers our question with an unqualified yes. The other two answers, pluralism and inclusivism, arise mainly out of opposition to exclusivism.
I have three major reasons for writing this book: (1) To see whether pluralism succeeds in developing a strong enough case against exclusivism to lead thoughtful people to abandon the Christian church’s historic teaching that Jesus is the only Savior (part 1); (2) to see whether inclusivism succeeds in developing a strong enough case against exclusivism to lead thoughtful Christians to embrace inclusivism (part 2); and (3) to present at least some of the reasons why many thoughtful and conscientious Christians continue to espouse Christian exclusivism.
A DEFINITION OF CHRISTIAN EXCLUSIVISM
Christian exclusivism can be defined as the belief that (1) Jesus Christ is the only Savior, and (2) explicit faith in Jesus Christ is necessary for salvation. The first claim denies that there are or can be other saviors, a fact that distinguishes it from pluralism. The second claim denies that people may be saved without conscious and explicit faith in Jesus Christ, which sets it apart from inclusivism. Christian exclusivists begin by believing that the tenets of one religion—in this case, Christianity—are true and that any religious beliefs that are logically incompatible with those tenets are false.
EXCLUSIVISM AND BIBLICAL AUTHORITY
Some people cannot understand why the Bible plays such a normative role in Christian thinking. Such people need to recognize that while humans are free to reject the authority of Scripture, they will only substitute some other authority in its place. Usually that authority is either their own opinions or those of other people. Christians believe that the Bible is God’s special revelation “inscripturated,” or communicated in writing. People who think this way understandably prefer the authority of God to that of some fallen and fallible human being.
The church’s access to truth cannot be credited to the natural, human wisdom of its apostles. Rather, it lies in the fact that God himself has graciously revealed himself and truth about himself to select individuals who have given the church an inscripturation of that revealed truth in the Bible.
Many who teach in self-described Christian seminaries and colleges today do not believe and probably do not understand this time-honored notion of revealed truth.
To a great extent, much nonorthodox theology over the past two hundred years is a chronicle of futile attempts to retain respectability for religious faith while denying Christianity access to revealed truth. About the only thing such thinkers can agree on is that God has not spoken and, indeed, cannot speak. And even if God could speak, according to this view, humans are incapable of understanding whatever he might say. The human relationship to God, therefore, must be understood according to some model other than that of receiving information or truth. Instead, it must be understood as an inward personal experience with God devoid of any objective, cognitive means of testing its validity.
Influenced by such views, many theologians and clergy trivialize or repudiate the central role that revealed truth has played in the Christian religion. Knowledge about God is simply declared impossible and replaced by personal encounter, religious feeling, trust, or obedience. This relatively new teaching clashes with the traditional view that divine special revelation is a communication of truth and that human knowledge of this revealed truth is essential to any personal relationship with God.
A study of the literature reveals that religious thinkers who reject the possibility of revealed truth seldom bother to support their position with arguments. 1 Their theory has simply become part of the theological mind-set in many departments of religion. Moreover, the doctrine of revealed truth that is so widely rejected today is a straw man—a false target. And finally, the most serious problems with their noncognitive (noninformational) view of revelation are simply ignored. 2 The theological agnosticism that is such an important feature of contemporary nonorthodox theology marks a dramatic break with a major tradition of historic Christianity, a tradition that has affirmed both an intelligible revelation from God and a divinely given human ability to know the transcendent God through the medium of true propositions.
English philosopher John Hick is the major representative of pluralism. We will study his views in great detail in chapters 2 – 6. John Hick professes to have experienced an evangelical kind of Christian conversion when he was nineteen years old and also reports that his early Christian beliefs were generally conservative or orthodox. 3 How did Hick come gradually to renounce every essential Christian belief he once affirmed? The obvious starting point lies in his defective understanding of divine revelation and Scripture. Hick’s capitulation to the prevailing neo-liberal or neo-orthodox view of Scripture was apparent by the time he published his book Faith and Knowledge in 1957. 4 Paul Eddy explains:
Although [Hick] had definitely departed from evangelical theology with his adoption of a non-propositional view of revelation and the attendant implications for the Scriptures, he nonetheless maintained a generally conservative, if neo-orthodox theology. The problem, of course, was that the philosophical foundations for such a theology had been severely undercut by his religious epistemology. In tracing Hick’s theological pilgrimage from this point on, one is primarily tracing the effects of the logical implications of his religious philosophy [that is, his defective understanding of special revelation] upon this theology. Thus, one could argue that nearly every major theological development throughout the next four decades was in one sense or another implicit in this early religious philosophy. 5
While Eddy applauds Hick’s early commitment to such essential Christian beliefs as the Incarnation, he points out that the basis for Hick’s actions was less than stable:
In faithfulness to his views of non-propositional revelation and the epistemological primacy of religious experience, Hick finds the cognitive grounds for Christological orthodoxy not in a cognitively-based revelation of truth from God, but rather in the very human attempts of the early Christian community to formulate what they perceived to be the theological implications of their religious experience of Jesus. With this as a model, it is not surprising to find Hick’s entire theology continuously spiraling away from its original orthodox source. 6
In other words, Hick retained a generally orthodox theology at the same time he had abandoned the epistemological foundation for those beliefs. Something had to give, and eventually it did. One by one, the early orthodox beliefs of John Hick disappeared from his system of thought. And as with almost all his neo-liberal peers, it apparently never occurred to Hick to examine critically the faulty presuppositions that had led him to deny even the possibility of divinely revealed truth.
My own critical examination of those unsupported, neo-liberal assumptions is the subject of an earlier book. 7 When theologians begin to think that knowledge about God is impossible and that religious truth is unimportant, it is only a matter of time until doctrines and creeds lose their relevance. Why worry about denials of Christian creeds if doctrine and truth are unimportant? Hick started down that path, and we will see where he ended up. Regrettably, many self-described evangelical thinkers today find Hick’s starting point acceptable. In this book we will see how their faulty understanding of divine revelation may have contributed to their own theological wanderings.
In another book I explained that every human being approaches life and thought from the perspective of some worldview, a comprehensive system of beliefs offering answers to life’s ultimate questions. 8 I also showed that many people do not realize that they even have a worldview. For that reason, many are also unaware of the content of their worldview and how it controls the way they think and live.
The Christian worldview is related to the Bible in at least two important ways. First, the basic assumption of the Christian worldview is the belief that human beings and the universe in which they reside are the creation of the God who has revealed himself in Scripture. This link between God and the Scriptures is both proper and necessary. It would be foolish for Christians to drive a wedge between God and his self-disclosure in the canon of Scripture. We have already seen what this did to John Hick’s thinking.
Second, the content of the Christian worldview is derived from God’s special revelation in the Bible. What this basically means is that if the Christian worldview passes the tests that should be applied to every worldview, this success reflects back positively upon the basic control-belief of the Christian’s worldview (expressed in the previous paragraph). Any positive appraisal of that belief must then reflect favorably upon the Christian’s basic religious authority, the Bible. 9 Since the biblical worldview passes the appropriate tests, the religious authority from which that worldview is drawn receives support from the same procedure. In other words, the Bible does not somehow get plugged into the process through some kind of irrational, blind “leap of faith.”
All of this means that Christians have a right to draw their convictions from Scripture and to test the claims of other Christians against the teaching of the Bible. They would be both foolish and inconsistent to do otherwise.
EXCLUSIVISM AND THE NEW TESTAMENT
Christian exclusivists believe that the New Testament affirms their position in several different but complementary ways. First, the New Testament repeatedly declares that salvation comes only through faith in Jesus Christ. One of many passages with this message is John 3:16 – 18:
For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because he has not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son.
In these words Jesus himself not only states that those who believe in him have eternal life but also warns that those who do not believe stand condemned.
In another familiar text, Jesus asserts in no uncertain terms, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6).
Of course, both these passages appear in the gospel of John and, as we will see, pluralists do not like the fourth gospel. Because it contains so much material that conflicts with their position, pluralists dismiss the authenticity of this gospel and the words it attributes to Jesus. Jesus, they contend, could never or would never have uttered the many “offensive” statements that appear in the fourth gospel. 10 No one who believes such statements could possibly be a pluralist. I will evaluate this dismissal of biblical material later, but for now we must see how exclusivism is clearly taught elsewhere in the New Testament.
Exclusivism is obviously taught in the book of Acts, which is Luke’s extension of his gospel. In Acts 4:12, Peter proclaims that “Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved.” Acts 8 relates that the Ethiopian eunuch is saved when Philip builds on his interest in Isaiah 53 and connects that passage to the good news about Jesus (Acts 8:35). When the Philippian jailer asks Paul and Silas what he must do to be saved, they reply, “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved” (Acts 16:31).
Paul’s epistle to the Romans is a detailed analysis of the nature and ground of justification, the act by which God imputes Christ’s righteousness to sinful humans who have trusted in Jesus. Paul makes it clear that the one and only ground of human justification before the holy God is the atoning work of Jesus Christ (see Romans 3:10 – 28; 5:1 – 11). In Romans 10, Paul explains how sinful men attain the righteousness that saves: “That if you confess with your mouth, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ and believe in your heart that God raised [Jesus] from the dead, you will be saved” (v. 9). In 1 Timothy 2:5, Paul declares that “there is one God and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus.”
In addition, Scripture also declares that human nature is so sinful that people are utterly hopeless apart from Jesus. 11 The New Testament affirms the importance of hearing the gospel and believing, as, for example, in Peter’s message at the first Pentecost (Acts 2) and Jesus’ Great Commission (Matt. 28:19 – 20).
Now, pluralists have their ways of dealing with biblical passages like these, and inclusivists have some techniques of their own as well. We will look at these methods later. The important point for now is that we can easily understand how and why Christians from the very inception of their faith have traditionally regarded exclusivism as an essential part of the total Christian message.
EXCLUSIVISM AND THEOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS
Besides the clear teaching of the New Testament, Christian exclusivists find natural support in a number of related theological ideas. A short list of these interconnected doctrines includes the deity of Christ, the Incarnation, the Atonement, and the Resurrection. If Jesus Christ is the eternal Son of God who became human for the express purpose of dying, and if he died as an atonement for human sin and then rose bodily from the grave, it is difficult to see how anyone can believe it is possible for some people to attain salvation apart from him. It is precisely because pluralists like John Hick see the logical entailments among these Christian doctrines that they exert such effort to deny them. To be a pluralist is unthinkable apart from a repudiation of the doctrinal heart of the historic Christian message.
John Hick admits to a logical connection between exclusivism and such Christian doctrines as the deity of Christ:
There is a direct line of logical entailment from the premise that Jesus was God, in the sense that he was God the Son, the Second Person of the Divine Trinity, living in a human life, to the conclusion that Christianity, and Christianity alone, was founded by God in person; and from this to the further conclusion that God must want all his human children to be related to him through his religion which he has himself founded for us; and then to the final conclusion, [that] “Outside Christianity, [there is] no salvation.” 12
Hick is certainly right in observing that if anyone accepts Christian doctrines such as these, that person is logically committed to accepting Jesus Christ as the only Savior. As we will see, Hick’s rejection of Christian exclusivism logically requires him to reject these essential Christian beliefs.
EXCLUSIVISM IN NON-CHRISTIAN RELIGIONS
Christian exclusivism receives an enormous amount of criticism in academic and ecclesiastical circles these days. But Christians are not the only exclusivists in the world. Most religions are exclusivist in the sense that each regards its own tradition’s central claims as true and competing claims as false. If anyone doubts this, all one needs to do is share the Christian gospel with some Muslim or Hindu and observe what happens.
It is ironic that when religious exclusivism gets savaged these days, one seldom, if ever, finds the self-professed guardians of religious “tolerance” and “open-mindedness” criticizing the many non-Christian exclusivists in the world. I am not quite sure what to make of this except possibly that some people are really more anti-Christian than they are anti-exclusivist.
SOME OTHER FACETS OF EXCLUSIVISM
A full account of Christian exclusivism should take note of several other convictions. One of these is the belief that unevangelized mature persons 13 will not only experience God’s judgment, but deserve such. Yet it is important to remember that Christian exclusivists often disagree greatly about the nature of hell and the condition of the lost. Opponents of exclusivism almost always ignore these disagreements and represent all exclusivists as advocates of the most extreme views on the subject of hell.
Another aspect of exclusivism that will require more comment later is the belief held by almost all exclusivists that human destiny is fixed at the moment of physical death. 14 The attainment of Christ’s redemption requires that people trust in Christ before death.
A significant disagreement between exclusivists and inclusivists involves the possible role of general revelation in salvation. Inclusivists insist that people outside any sphere of Christian influence may nonetheless be saved by trusting in whatever they may learn from God’s general revelation in Creation, conscience, and history. Exclusivists disagree.
Bruce Demarest identifies in the Puritan view of general revelation several points that are shared by most exclusivists. General revelation, Demarest explains,
teaches no redemptive truths. But if general revelation…provides insufficient light for the salvation of the soul, it does nevertheless serve at least two practical ends. In the first place, general revelation leaves the unrepentant sinner without excuse. Objectively, the divine self-disclosure in Creation, history, and conscience is sufficiently clear that God should be known as Creator, Ruler, and Judge. 15
The apostle Paul notes in Romans 1 how humans willfully rebel against the light that God gives them in nature, history, and conscience. In Demarest’s words, Paul “proceeds to establish the link between rejection of the witness of general revelation and man’s guiltiness. Since all people are brought face-to-face with the light of God in Creation, providence, and conscience, all are morally responsible for the rational choices they make. Since all people plainly see the signature of God written on His works, no pleas of ignorance can be offered.” 16 This helps explain why all humans are “without excuse” (Rom. 1:20). 17
This leads Demarest to conclude that
General revelation thus performs the function of rendering man judicially accountable before God. If God were not discernible in His works, if general revelation were invalid or failed to mediate knowledge of God, then the masses of people who have never heard the gospel would be innocent of their ungodliness and irreligion. But since knowledge of God is mediated to all by general revelation, human accountability to God is firmly established. Hence in practice, general revelation becomes a vehicle not for salvation but for divine judgement. 18
This position is totally rejected by pluralists, who believe that non-Christian religions are equally legitimate vehicles for salvation, and by inclusivists, who insist that the content of general revelation is sufficient to bring unevangelized people to salvation in the total absence of information about the Christian gospel.
EXCLUSIVISM AND ITS OPPONENTS
If Christian exclusivism is true, then all the following alternatives are false:
1.Atheism
2.Universalism
3.Non-Christian Religions
4.Pluralism
5.Inclusivism
Because this book focuses on the dispute among exclusivists, pluralists, and inclusivists, we will not discuss atheism.
In one sense, the broad topic of universalism is also beyond the scope of this book, even though many pluralists such as John Hick are also universalists. By “universalism,” I mean the belief that no human being will ultimately be lost. Sooner or later, universalists believe, God will eventually save every person. We will refer to universalism later only in connection with some observations as to why Christian inclusivists tend to reject the position.
This book will also say very little about the specific content of various non-Christian religions. I have intentionally given this book a narrow focus. It would require a quite different book, probably twice as long as this one, to examine specific details of non-Christian religions. My focus in this work is on positions 4 and 5 on my list, pluralism and inclusivism.
PLURALISM
A pluralist is a person who thinks humans may be saved through a number of different religious traditions and saviors. John Hick explains his own pluralism this way: “There is not merely one way but a plurality of ways of salvation or liberation…taking place in different ways within the contexts of all the great religious traditions.” 19
Hick, whose many writings on the subject set the pace for many Western pluralists, wants to avoid a relativism that treats all religious beliefs and systems equally. He has proposed a test that enables us to grade religions, and as he sees things, at least the major religions of the world pass this test. All qualify equally as valid roads to salvation. However, movements such as the Peoples’ Temple of Jim Jones and the Branch Davidian cult of David Koresh fail the test, as do systems that practice human sacrifice or cannibalism. Unfortunately, pluralists have not identified a criterion to mark the line between authentic and inauthentic “responses to the Transcendent” clearly enough to make it work on a broad scale. Even though Hick tells us that Jim Jones was on the wrong side of the line, it will not be clear to everyone how to apply the same criterion in other cases. 20
But Hick and other prominent pluralists do not think that the salvific value of the great religions requires anyone to believe in the existence of the myriad gods found in these systems. That would only commit pluralism to what amounts to a new religion, namely, a new type of polytheism with a confusing and contradictory amalgam of beliefs. As Joseph Runzo explains, sophisticated pluralists hold “that there is only One Ultimate Reality, but that Ultimate Reality is properly, though only partially, understood in different ways.” 21 (A bit later, when we hear pluralists like Hick tell us that God or Ultimate Reality is unknowable, I will ask the reader to reflect a bit on how the pluralist can know the content of propositions like Runzo’s.)
INCLUSIVISM
Inclusivists agree with exclusivists and differ from pluralists in affirming that Jesus Christ is the only Savior. No man or woman can possibly be saved apart from the redemptive work of Jesus Christ, inclusivists say, and this is so whether the person is raised under a Christian, Buddhist, Muslim, or Hindu system.
But inclusivists also part company with exclusivists, a point that at first may seem confusing. How can a position that insists on the deity of Jesus Christ and the indispensability of his redemptive work for salvation be a source of concern to theologically conservative Christians?
One way to answer this question is to introduce two technical terms that inclusivists frequently use. They distinguish between the ontological necessity of Christ’s work as redeemer and the separate claim that Christ’s redemptive work is epistemologically necessary.
The word ontology refers to what is the case in the world of being or reality. Inclusivists affirm the ontological necessity of Christ’s redemptive work; they agree with exclusivists that Jesus’ atoning work is the necessary ground for the salvation of any human being. The word epistemology points to an entirely different matter, that of what people know or believe. When inclusivists deny the epistemological necessity of Christ’s work, they are saying that it is not necessary for people to know about Jesus or believe in Jesus to receive the benefits of his redemptive work.
So inclusivists believe that salvation is impossible apart from Jesus and that he is the only Savior. But this does not mean that people have to know about Jesus or actually believe in him to receive that salvation. There are problems, inclusivists argue, in limiting salvation to those who have a conscious knowledge of and explicit faith in Jesus Christ. What do we do with the millions of people, past and present, who never heard the gospel? Is God’s grace limited to the relatively few who, often through accidents of time and geography, happen to have responded to the gospel? 22 Isn’t it reasonable to think that millions of others over the long course of human history would have believed had only they known? Inclusivists dismiss exclusivists as cold, uncaring people who are unwilling to explore other ways to expand the scope of God’s love.
Many people find this kind of emotional appeal persuasive. Of course, exclusivists reject the way they and their beliefs are stereotyped. Exclusivists also think it is important to consider some other information before allowing one’s feelings to dictate Christian doctrine.
Many inclusivists appear to have more respect for pluralism than for exclusivism. In some cases, as we will see, they suggest that if they ever found reasons to abandon their inclusivism, they would move toward pluralism and away from exclusivism. 23
According to inclusivist Clark Pinnock, exclusivists “have made it ridiculously easy for liberals to attack classical theology (in particular, its christology). Scholars such as John Hick have been making mincemeat out of us [evangelical Christians], arguing all too convincingly that evangelicals have nothing to contribute to the discussion of religious pluralism.” 24 Few of us enjoy being reduced to mincemeat. When we examine the pluralist’s case against exclusivism, we will have to see whether the complaints of John Hick and other pluralists are as powerful as Pinnock seems to think.
CONCLUSION
This chapter has introduced the three positions we will examine in this book. They can be distinguished in terms of their response to the following two propositions:
1.Jesus Christ is the only Savior.
2.No one can be saved unless he or she knows the information about Jesus’ person and work contained in the Gospel and unless he or she exercises explicit faith in Jesus Christ.
