Author: Glen

I was recent­ly think­ing about 1^st Tim­o­thy 2:5–6: “For there is one God and one inter­me­di­ary between God and human­i­ty, Christ Jesus, him­self human, who gave him­self as a ran­som for all, reveal­ing God’s pur­pose at his appoint­ed time.” (New Eng­lish Trans­la­tion)

These vers­es high­light the aspect of Chris­tian­i­ty that both­ers West­ern­ers most: its exclu­siv­i­ty. The notion that Jesus is the only way to God vex­es many peo­ple.

This morn­ing a thought occurred to me: almost every­one who believes in God believes that there’s only one way. Most peo­ple just don’t real­ize it.

For most peo­ple I know, their “one way” is being nice. Unless you are nice/­good/s­in­cere/al­tru­is­tic/em­pa­thet­ic/en­light­ened/ad­jec­tive-of-choice enough, you fail.

The way of nice­ness is no less lim­it­ing than the way of faith in Christ: it excludes peo­ple just as sure­ly and it is far more arbi­trary.

This is coun­ter­in­tu­itive to some peo­ple, so allow me to explain.

It is exclu­sive in that some peo­ple just aren’t nice enough. More on that lat­er.

It is arbi­trary in that the dev­il is in the details. How do you know if you’ve been nice enough? And what con­sti­tutes the right kind of nice­ness, any­way? After all, there’s no real rea­son to sup­pose that an infi­nite­ly smart Being would mea­sure nice­ness in the way that makes the most sense to you.

The Chris­t­ian prin­ci­ple of exclu­siv­i­ty makes more sense, for it flows from the sim­ple belief that Jesus is God in the flesh.

Think­ing about this for a sec­ond should make the rea­son­ing clear.

If you believe that Jesus is God, then to say you can come to God apart from Jesus is as non­sen­si­cal as say­ing you can go to Los Ange­les with­out going to Cal­i­for­nia.

In oth­er words, all that Chris­tians are insist­ing is that you can’t come to God with­out com­ing to God. This hard­ly seems con­tro­ver­sial. You may reject the premis­es of the argu­ment (that God exists or that Jesus is God), but grant­ed those two the belief can’t be cat­e­go­rized as extreme or bizarre. It’s just con­sis­tent.

The real prob­lem most peo­ple seem to have isn’t that Chris­tian­i­ty is exclu­sive. Their real prob­lem is that Chris­tian­i­ty appears to be unfair­ly exclu­sive. This is most often expressed as fol­lows, “What about those who have nev­er heard of Christ? How can God exclude them sim­ply because they haven’t heard of Jesus?”

There are actu­al­ly some very rea­son­able answers to those ques­tions. Here’s one, here’s anoth­er

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, and here’s yet a third. There are more where those came from — if this ques­tion dis­tress­es you then dig into it. You won’t agree with every­thing you read. I cer­tain­ly don’t agree with every argu­ment in three arti­cles I linked. Fig­ure out what you believe for your­self.

But here’s the impor­tant thing to real­ize: the same prob­lem con­fronts the nice­ness stan­dard. What about those born in the wrong time or the wrong place? Some of your ances­tors owned slaves in accor­dance with the cus­toms of their cul­ture (this is true regard­less of your eth­nic­i­ty) — did they fail a test they did­n’t know they were tak­ing?

Some of them like­ly burned cats to death for fun. Do they fail the nice­ness test mere­ly because they were born in the wrong time or in the wrong place?

For that mat­ter, what of you? Who knows which of our actions our grand­chil­dren will deem immoral? Per­haps you have been born in the wrong time and place to achieve a rea­son­able stan­dard of nice­ness.

You might object that we should judge peo­ple rel­a­tive to the stan­dards of their own cul­ture, so we don’t need to wor­ry about what stan­dards our grand­chil­dren will hold us up against. Per­haps. Believ­ing that would require you to stop judg­ing dic­ta­tor­ships, sweat­shops, mod­ern-day slave traf­fick­ing, and racism in oth­er cul­tures. Also, you will need to let the Church off the hook for things like the Cru­sades and the Inqui­si­tion. This is just one the prob­lems that emerges from the notion that moral stan­dards are com­plete­ly rel­a­tive to cul­ture or per­son­al­i­ty. There are sev­er­al detailed cri­tiques avail­able: here’s one

, here’s anoth­er, and here is a third (that last one is a pdf writ­ten by Car­di­nal Ratzinger before he became Pope).

So if your main beef with Chris­tian­i­ty is that it’s exclu­sive, exam­ine your own beliefs care­ful­ly. You might be sur­prised to dis­cov­er just how exclu­sion­ary they turn out to be.

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I was chat­ting with De Wen (a stu­dent in our min­istry) yes­ter­day and he made a com­ment that real­ly res­onat­ed with me: “God wants friends, not fans.”

A lot of us set­tle for being fans. I often set­tle for being a fan. But there’s so much more avail­able — like Abra­ham, we can be friends with God (Isa­iah 41:8, James 2:23). As he did to the dis­ci­ples, Jesus yearns to say to us, “I no longer call you ser­vants but friends” (John 15:15).

But the temp­ta­tion to be a mere fan is strong. In Jim­my Tate’s mem­o­rable phrase, we sub­sti­tute praise for prayer. We allow the life of the church to dis­place our own spir­i­tu­al jour­ney and we live vic­ar­i­ous­ly through the pas­tor’s insights or the wor­ship lead­er’s zeal. Like a duti­ful fan, we turn out for the game (Sun­day morn­ing) and cheer at all the appro­pri­ate places. But we don’t call the coach after the game to con­grat­u­late him or shoot the breeze. We don’t invite him over for a vic­to­ry bbq. That’s the stuff a friend would do.

We’re just fans, so we go home and talk about how great the game was.

And we miss out on some­thing won­der­ful.

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