An inclusive understanding of the faith

#3 in my little sermon sequence

I’ve deferred the discussion of the cross and the Prince of this World to next week

Many of you will know that throughout my teenage years I was a militant atheist – but how did I become one? I was raised in a classically Anglican household, that was the ‘atmosphere’ and context in which I first formed my understanding of the world, so what changed?

When I was about thirteen or fourteen I had a conversation with a class friend who was a conservative Christian, and how Gandhi was certainly going to hell because he didn’t explicitly confess Jesus as the Christ. This didn’t sit well with me, as I have always considered Gandhi something of a personal hero. Now this does not mean, at all, that I think that he is without sin, or the source of salvation – only that he shows what it looks like if you take Jesus’ teaching about non-violence seriously. In other words, he points to Jesus, he pointed me to Jesus. So there is no salvation in Gandhi – and he wouldn’t have said that there was – but that doesn’t mean that we cannot see the light of Christ at work in him. How can this be? In other words, how is a Christian to understand the nature of other faiths?

There are – and I’m summarising a bit here – there are essentially three basic positions, which can be thought of as pluralist, inclusive, or exclusive. If we think of it as being like paths up a mountain, the pluralist says that all paths get you to the top of the mountain; the inclusivist says that there are other paths up the same mountain but the top of the mountain is Jesus; the exclusivist says that other paths are not on the same mountain – some are even paths down into the depths... Does that make sense?

Now the pluralist position isn’t Christian as it denies the distinctiveness of Christ. It says that Jesus is just like other religious leaders. What’s often missed, though, is that it also denies any of the particular truth claims made by any religion, it is essentially an imperalist ideology that says to a religious believer ‘I know your religion better than you know your religion’. It is very bound up with an atheist, secular approach to understanding the world. So I won’t spend more time on that view here.

For me the real challenge or question is where to draw the line between the inclusive and exclusive understandings of Christianity. In our reading this morning Jesus said ‘I am the way, the truth and the life; no-one comes to the Father except through me’. I believe that to be the truth, but I’m essentially an inclusivist; let me explain why.

Nobody comes to the Father except by Jesus – but do they have to say a particular phrase or use a particular title to come to him? Jesus himself says ‘Not everyone who calls me Lord shall enter the Kingdom of Heaven but those who do the will of my Father who is in Heaven’, he says that he has sheep in other sheepfolds, Paul talks about those who have not heard the Law but have the Law inscribed upon their hearts who do ‘naturally’ what the Law requires... it seems to me that there is a solid Scriptural case that can be made for an inclusive understanding of the salvation offered in Christ.

This draws upon the larger cosmic claims about who Jesus is: that he was before all things and in him all things hold together, that all things were created through him and without him was not anything made that was made. Which means that wherever we go and with whomsoever we interact, Jesus is there. We are all made in the image of God, therefore we all have the capacity for grace inscribed within us, a ‘common grace’.

Yet there is a feature of the inclusive account that is often missed. In saying that we can recognise good things in other faiths, in saying that we can see that people of other faiths can live good lives that show the love of God in our world – we are using Jesus as the standard for what that looks like. Jesus is the measure by which we assess whether something is of God or not. We are using Jesus as the standard, and this is inescapable. We are not relativists. Jesus is Lord.

And if we can see good things in other faiths, using Jesus as the standard, we can also thereby also see bad things in other faiths, again using Jesus as the standard – indeed we can use Jesus as the standard when we look at the history of our own faith! I don’t suppose there would be any disagreement with the idea that the followers of Jesus have, at certain times and in certain places, fallen short of the way that Jesus showed that we must walk in. Jesus is the standard for all of us, inside and outside of the church.

In the end Jesus is Lord; he is the way, the truth and the life; for now we see as through a glass darkly but one day we shall see him face to face.

Amen.