Exclusively Inclusive

I was brows­ing through An Emer­gent Man­i­festo of Hope in the hope of find­ing some­thing semi-substantial to write on.  Luck­ily I encoun­tered a con­tribut­ing author by the name of (Pas­tor) Samir Sel­manovic. In his arti­cle he writes:

When we say that only Christ saves, Christ rep­re­sents some­thing larger than the per­son we Chris­tians have come to know. He is all and in all. And Christ being “the only way” is not a state­ment of exclu­sion but inclu­sion, an expres­sion of what is uni­ver­sal. If a rela­tion­ship with a spe­cific per­son, namely Christ, is the whole sub­stance of a rela­tion­ship with the God of the Bible, then the vast major­ity if peo­ple in world his­tory are excluded from the pos­si­bil­ity of a rela­tion­ship with the God of the Bible, along with the Hebrews of the Old Tes­ta­ment who were with­out a knowl­edge of Jesus Christ–the per­son. The ques­tion begs to be asked: would God who gives enough rev­e­la­tion for peo­ple to be judged but not enough rev­e­la­tion to be saved be a God worth wor­ship­ing? Never!.… The­olo­gian Miroslav Volf says, “God may employ their reli­gious con­vic­tions and prac­tices, or God may work apart from those con­vic­tions and prac­tices.… That’s partly how the giv­ing and for­giv­ing God works in Chris­tians too, often using but some­times cir­cum­vent­ing their con­vic­tions and prac­tices”. To put it in dif­fer­ent terms, there is no sal­va­tion out­side of Christ, but there is sal­va­tion out­side of Chris­tian­ity.¹

My topic for this post would then seem to be the doc­trine of exclu­sivism which Sel­manovic defines in a foot­note as “Inclu­sive­ness believes that the work of Jesus is onto­log­i­cally (in sub­stance) nec­es­sary for sal­va­tion but not epis­te­mo­log­i­cally (in name) nec­es­sary” ². In other words, one can be saved with­out know­ing Christ. This leaves room the pos­si­bil­ity of sal­va­tion in sys­tems other than and per­haps con­trary to the mes­sage of Christ. For instance, God might save one based on the sin­cer­ity of their belief; sal­va­tion by merit.

Polit­i­cally Incor­rect Salvation

A reader of Chris­tian­ity today asked the ques­tion, “The Gospel of Jesus Christ: An Evan­gel­i­cal Cel­e­bra­tion” states that sin­cere wor­shipers of other reli­gions will not be saved—does that also refer to Moses and other Old Tes­ta­ment faith­ful?“³ What is sig­nif­i­cant about this ques­tion is not so much that it was asked, but that the­olo­gian J.I. Packer pro­vided the answer and in doing so replied in part to what Sel­manovic has said (“the vast major­ity if peo­ple in world his­tory are excluded from the pos­si­bil­ity of a rela­tion­ship with the God of the Bible, along with the Hebrews of the Old Tes­ta­ment”). The answer to this read­ers ques­tion is of course no, “the words quoted speak only of our own era, the almost two mil­len­nia since our Lord Jesus Christ lived, died, rose, and ascended. Moses appears in Hebrews 11:24–29 as a hero of faith, along with Abel, Enoch, Noah, the patri­archs, his own par­ents, and oth­ers. These Old Tes­ta­ment believ­ers, so we read, looked for “a bet­ter coun­try, that is, a heav­enly one … a bet­ter life” (v 16, 35), which God had planned for them with us (v. 40). They trusted God’s promises, which included indi­ca­tors of the com­ing Christ, and their faith now stands as a model for us all. I, for one, expect to meet them in the world to come“⁴. In other words, whereas the Hebrews looked for­ward to Jesus, we in a sense look back­ward to Jesus.

The read­ers ques­tion is, how­ever, sin­cere and gen­uine. With the world becom­ing a ‘global vil­lage’ (as some have sug­gested), reli­gious plu­ral­ism and the exclu­sive truth claims of one reli­gion over another, the ‘fate’ of those who do not belong to that reli­gion become con­cern­ing ques­tions. The real­ity is that the Bible pro­vides an answer that peo­ple don’t want to hear. God, for many, becomes uncon­scionable and unwor­thy of our praise (as Sel­manovic would later go on to say). Packer con­tin­ues, “the first thing to say, and with empha­sis, is that beyond the stark fac­tual state­ment (“the Bible offers no hope”), all is spec­u­la­tion. The stark state­ment is cer­tainly cor­rect. The New Tes­ta­ment, exegeted ratio­nally and with­out read­ing into it what can­not be read out of it, tells us that the Chris­t­ian faith is true for every­body, and that all need God’s for­give­ness and res­cue from the power of sin and Satan. All are called to turn to Jesus Christ and so become God’s adopted chil­dren, and eter­nal life comes only to those who do this.“⁵

The result of this very hard to digest doc­trine is the pro­posal of more palat­able sote­ri­o­log­i­cal sys­tems, how­ever the­o­log­i­cally unsound they may be. The real­ity is that while an increase in reli­gious plu­ral­ity and diver­sity may be some­thing of a new thing for those in North Amer­ica specif­i­cally,  it cer­tainly wasn’t new to the early church in Rome. The Roman empire was filled with a mul­ti­tude of reli­gions, most seen as viable alter­na­tives to each other; cer­tainly they were all legit­i­mate. It seems to me we’re really deal­ing with a repeat episode of sorts except that this time we’re not claim­ing sin­gu­lar truth in an envi­ron­ment of reli­gious plu­ral­ity. We’re claim­ing (or were claim­ing) sin­gu­lar truth in an envi­ron­ment of reli­gious dis­tinc­tion mov­ing into an envi­ron­ment of reli­gious plu­ral­ity. The pen­du­lum has swung in one direc­tion, now it’s swing­ing back in the other. Chris­tians not happy with the exclu­sive claims of Christ are find­ing valid­ity in sys­tems which the early Church rejected mil­len­nia ago. World mis­sions is the one area of Chris­t­ian the­ol­ogy and prac­tice most influenced.

William Lane Craig con­tributed a chap­ter to the book Chris­t­ian Apolo­get­ics in the Post­mod­ern World titled Polit­i­cally Incor­rect Sal­va­tion (as you may have noticed the title above) in which, among other things, he dis­cussed the impact an adop­tion of inclu­sivism would have on the Evan­gel­i­cal world. The rea­son, says Craig, for the grow­ing adop­tion of inclu­sivism within the Evan­gel­i­cal world is that “con­tem­po­rary reli­gious plu­ral­ism regards the tra­di­tional Chris­t­ian doc­trine of sal­va­tion through Christ alone as uncon­scionable. The prob­lem seems to be that the exis­tence of an all-loving and all-powerful God seems incom­pat­i­ble with the claim that per­sons who do not hear and embrace the gospel of sal­va­tion through Christ will be damned“⁶. I thought which seems to be per­fectly in line with Sel­manovic and Packer. Com­ment­ing on the impact an adop­tion of inclu­sivism would have on world mis­sions, Craig writes:

Mis­si­o­log­i­cally, a broad inclu­sivism under­mines the task of world mis­sion. Since vast num­bers of per­sons in non-Christian reli­gions are in fact already included in sal­va­tion, they need not be evan­ge­lized. Instead mis­sions are rein­ter­preted along the lines of social engagement–a sort of Chris­t­ian peace corps, if you will. Nowhere is this rein­ter­pre­ta­tion of mis­sions bet­ter illus­trated than in the doc­u­ments of the Sec­ond Vat­i­can Coun­cil. In its Dog­matic Con­sti­tu­tion on the Church, the Coun­cil declared that those who have not yet received the gospel are related in var­i­ous ways to the peo­ple of God. Jews, in par­tic­u­lar, remain dear to God, but the plan of sal­va­tion also includes all who acknowl­edge the Cre­ator, such as Mus­lims. The Coun­cil there­fore declared that Catholics now pray for the Jews, not for the con­ver­sion of the Jews and also declares that the Church looks with esteem upon Mus­lims. Mis­sion­ary work seems to be directed only toward those who “serve the crea­ture rather than the Cre­ator” or are utterly hope­less. The Coun­cil thus implies that vast mul­ti­tudes of per­sons who con­sciously reject Christ are in fact saved and there­fore not appro­pri­ate tar­gets for evan­ge­liza­tion⁷.

What then is the pur­pose of doing mis­sions work with a group of peo­ple who are merely igno­rant of their sal­va­tion, but still saved? None. Unfor­tu­nately, unless deal­ing with a view along the line of hard athe­ism, it’s also an arbi­trary dis­tinc­tion; who can truly judge the sin­cer­ity of another per­son? Ulti­mately what will hap­pen is that mis­sions work will slowly suc­cumb to the view that all philoso­phies and reli­gious sys­tems are legit­i­mate. The only group eli­gi­ble for evan­ge­lism will be that group which denies the exis­tence of God (‘athe­ism’), how­ever I sus­pect that if their athe­ism is viewed as sin­cere, we’ll leave them untouched as well.

Bib­li­cally Cor­rect Salvation

The bib­li­cal real­ity is that if you haven’t accepted Christ, you won’t be granted sal­va­tion. Any other view, as Packer men­tioned, is pure spec­u­la­tion and it’s spec­u­la­tion which is not bib­li­cally founded (and frankly dan­ger­ous, even if it were the case). Bib­li­cally speak­ing we must repent of our sins (Luke 13:3) and turn to Christ (John 3:16; Romans 10:9) who is the only way to God (John 14:6). It wasn’t a polit­i­cally cor­rect teach­ing in Rome and it cer­tainly isn’t a polit­i­cally cor­rect teach­ing in today’s world.

Related posts:

1. Stretched Illus­tra­tions?