Isn’t it intolerant or even unloving to believe that Jesus is the only way to God?

When it comes to the exclusivity of Christ as a means of salvation, the Bible is emphatic.  In John 14:6, Jesus says, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”  While Jesus’ statements about loving others, being humble and turning the other cheek are often hailed today, it is his claims to exclusivity that stir doubts deep within us.  How can this be?  Doesn’t God love everyone?  What about those that lead extraordinarily good lives apart from Jesus?  Are we to believe that they do not end up in Heaven?

These doubts are primarily fed by the western culture in which we live.  Overall, morality is viewed as subjective.  While some choose to remain abstinent before marriage, others consider it important to have as many sexual encounters as possible.  Neither, as culture would have it, is wrong.  They are both valid moral stances.  Moreover, there is no religion that has a claim on objective truth.  All religions are equally valid, and it is only your sincerity that matters.  This “religious pluralism” is the overriding religious truth of our culture today. 

Within the context of this view on religion and morality, there is the primary virtue of tolerance.  This is not the same “tolerance” that our forefathers knew and understood.  To previous generations, “tolerating” someone or something was to acknowledge that you disagreed with it, maybe even know that it was objectively wrong, yet choose to live peaceably with it.  This version of “tolerance” would be seen as wildly intolerant today!  That is because tolerance has come to mean something altogether different.  To be tolerant, one must now not only approve of other views that are contradictory to your own, but one must also embrace and celebrate those views. 

It is within a culture of religious pluralism and “tolerance” that we find ourselves doubting Jesus’ claim that he is the only way to God.  However, if we are to allow our culture to feed our doubts, then we must first be assured that our culture has got it right.  If our culture seems to have a firm grasp on reality, and if it then says that core Christian claims ought to be doubted, we would have a real problem.  If, on the other hand, our cultural norms are found to be badly misled, the doubts that its teachings create can be dismissed.

Here, as we analyze the culture, we do not find its case for trustworthiness or truthfulness compelling.  To start with, religious pluralism is founded on the idea that all religions are equally valid, and that it is our sincerity that counts.  This cannot possibly be the case in reality.  First, all noteworthy religions make truth claims that are contradictory with all the other religions.  Christianity claims Jesus is the only way to God.  Christians reject the claims of the Islamic prophet Muhammad, while Muslims claim that the Judeo-Christian Bible is flawed wherever it contradicts their teachings.  Pantheism claims there are many true religions, which is clearly a contradiction to the many exclusivity claims within the other world religions.  In short, there is no way that all religions can be equally valid and true.  At most, only one religion can be true.  At worst all religions are equally false.  But if all religions are false, we cannot possibly say that it is only our sincerity that matters, for we would all be sincere towards blatantly false ideas. 

In this way, we see that religious pluralism is either illogical or atheistic.  If it is the former, then we may reject it.  If it is the latter, then it really ascribes to its own faith in atheism as the one true belief.  This also makes it a contradictory position, since it would not consider all beliefs equally valid, for only atheism could be true and all other religions false. 

Another strike against religious pluralism is its insistence that everyone accept all religions as equally valid.  Such a position purports to be “tolerant.”  However, it is easily seen that this is not the case.  For if one were to adopt this view, they MUST place all religious exclusivity claims under condemnation.  As we have seen, all religions DO make exclusivity claims.  Thus, religious pluralism, of necessity, must be intolerant of all religions.  Even those religions that claim there are no objective religious truths are themselves implying that it is objectively true of all religions that there are no objectively true religious claims.  This is obviously a contradiction.

This leads to the third and fatal flaw of the religious pluralism culture in which we live.  One of its core teachings is that there are no objective religious truths that hold for all people at all times.  However, this teaching is supposedly a religious teaching that applies to all people at all times.  If it did not, then it would have no power.  Yet, people today insist that this must be true.  But if it IS true, then it must be an objectively true religious statement, thus rendering the statement false be default.  Religious pluralism is thus dead in the water.

This also helps to establish the undeniable truth that there ARE objective religious truths.  Thus, when Jesus says that he is the only way to God, he must be either absolutely correct or absolutely false.  In order to decide, we must evaluate his claim (and many other claims that he made) on its own merit.  We should not and ought not evaluate the claims of Christ based on an obviously false and contradictory culture that is predicated on “false” tolerance.  There is much objective evidence that supports Christianity, and we must not allow a culture that relies primarily on emotion and peer pressure to dictate which direction our faith should go.