Is There Only One Way?

Several years back I read excerpts of an interview with Sheila Larson, a young nurse. “I believe in God,” she said. “I’m not a religious fanatic. I can’t remember the last time I went to church. My faith has carried me a long way. It’s Sheliaism. Just my own little voice.”

Sheila Larson speaks for multitudes of Americans. Unlike other Western nations, which in recent decades have seemed to abandon religious impulses at every turn, America has seen an enthusiastic pursuit of personal spiritual experience. This is not to be confused, however, with the embrace of the traditional claims of religion, especially those of Christianity.

An increasingly number of people have jettisoned the idea that there is something objectively true out there for everyone to discover, and are instead coming to the conclusion that we all can, and should, maintain an inner truth that is ours alone, sealed off from the rest of the world.
That trend was confirmed by a survey conducted by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, the results of which were published last month. It portrays America as a nation of believers. But the notion that my trust in God or Jesus or Moses is “the only way” to the fullness of life in this world, and to heaven in the next, is well on its way to becoming a minority opinion. Even evangelical Christians – those who are most often accused of Terminal Certainty when it comes to faith – are surrendering the concept of the “onlyness” of Jesus. Some 57% of the evangelical respondents believe that heaven can be accessed through other religions.

It’s hard to overstate what a dramatic shift this represents from past belief and practice. Forty years ago, Lutheran and Methodist parents might typically wring their hands if their children were dating Presbyterians or Baptists. Today it is more likely not only that church members will be ignorant about what “those other guys” believe, but to be fundamentally clueless about their own convictions. Interpreters of the Pew survey suggest that Americans are becoming not only more tolerant of other religious pathways, but more ignorant of their own.

Consider the watershed question of whether trusting Jesus is the only way to heaven. More than once I have been part of earnest conversations in which choosing a religious option has been likened to the kind of soul-searching that happens in Baskin & Robbins: Some people believe that Rocky Road is the One True Flavor, while others are prepared to give their lives in defense of Pralines and Cream. Wouldn’t it be wiser and better to acknowledge that spiritual choices are, in the end, just a matter of taste, and that different religions are essentially little more than different pathways up the same mountain of truth?

The implication is that all options are equal. Sheliaism is no better than Glennism which is no better than Jesusism.

The New Testament is a good deal edgier than that. Imagine a different illustration. A cardiologist has assured you that you are afflicted with a serious heart disease. You face numerous options. Some are foolish; you can choose to do nothing, for instance, and hope that your coronary arteries clear up by themselves. Some are dangerous; you can take a good deal of arsenic, which will guarantee that you won’t feel those chest pains (or anything else) within a matter of hours.

Gradually it becomes clear that there is one best way forward: Submit to heart surgery if you want to go on living. This illustration has limitations, naturally. Our technology of healing hearts continues to evolve over the years, while the Bible would say that you can’t improve on the remedy that Jesus of Nazareth proposed in the Sermon on the Mount.

When Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6), I don’t believe he was closing the door on the possibility that he can save those who don’t know his name in this world. The God of the Bible seems to delight in introducing himself to those outside the boundaries of what his chosen people have expected at any given moment. Nor is tolerance something to be rejected. If by that we mean appreciation, kindness, respect, and open eyes and ears in our dialogue with those of different spiritual convictions, then tolerance is long overdue.

But if we are willing to examine with openness and honesty what Jesus said about himself, we will discover that he did not see spiritual truth as a matter of personal taste or as a preference of one path up the mountain over that one (because the view is so much better). We cannot deny that he saw himself as the uniquely competent surgeon for the human heart. The only question is whether we think that claim stands up, and are willing to act on it.

At the present moment in America, a majority of our neighbors seem to be saying, “He was sincerely mistaken.” Christians are those who are betting their lives that he wasn’t.