Jesus is the only way

Sixth article in the series “With Good Reason”

by Keith Bassham

If you’ve been following this series of ar­ticles, I hope you have picked up on a few basics about apologetics.

First, apologetics is not just for profession­als. You really should try this at home. We are all called to evangelism, and a good part of that evangelism in this era includes making a cred­ible defense of a belief in God, in the Bible, and in Jesus as presented in the Bible.

Second, Christian faith is defensible. Even if you were brought up without exposure to competing faiths (or non-faiths), it does not follow that your teachers were covering up, or worse yet, cowering because no defense was possible. Perhaps they thought defend­ing the faith was unnecessary, or perhaps they considered intellectual arguments tended to work against faith rather than for it. Whatever the reason, today’s multicultural and skepti­cal world demands we know what and why we believe.

Third, while I have discussed intellectual and logical reasons to believe, many things I assert in those arguments cannot be dem­onstrated with 100 percent certainty. Take, for example, in the last article about reasons to believe the Bible. In that article, I refer to history, archeology, and prophecy. I wrote of ancient manuscripts that were not identical in every detail, and yet were numerous enough and enough alike that we could establish some degree of confidence in their accuracy. In no example, however, could I declare an abso­lute certainty based on physical and logical evidence. To do so would make faith unneces­sary, and belief in the Jesus Christ of the Bible will require a step of faith. However, as we also showed in the last article, there is a difference between a step of faith and a leap of faith.

I believe it’s the idea in that last paragraph that creates the most trouble for the Christian who wants to proclaim God as the only true God, the Bible as God’s only revealed Word, and Jesus as the only way to God. These are claims to truth. And these are exclusive claims. One God. One Word. One Savior. If these phrases are true, then all competing claims are false. And that is dangerous talk these days.

Franklin Graham, son of well-known evangelist Billy Graham, can tell you first hand how people respond to claims such as this. Earlier this year, he publicly repeated state­ments he had made in 2003 concerning Islam saying the religion was “wicked” and “evil.” Graham, who had been scheduled to lead a National Day of Prayer event at the Pentagon May 6, found himself “disinvited” at the behest of Mikey Weinstein, who had sent a letter to Secretary of Defense Robert Gates demanding that the invitation to Graham be rescinded.

Now, one could argue that Graham was cancelled because his statements were “divi­sive” and “offensive,” and that in fact is the offi­cial reason given for the cancellation, but there is more to it. Weinstein, president and founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (who has also been nominated for the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize, by the way), reports that along with the letter, MRFF had also “retained aggressive trial lawyers” and was planning to seek a restraining order to stop the entire event if the invitation to Graham was not withdrawn.

As it turns out, Weinstein has been protesting Christian influence within the na­tion’s military several years, believing that the military “has just been completely infused by premillennial, dispensational, reconstruction­ist, dominionist, evangelical, fundamentalist Christians….” He did not want to stop Graham from speaking as much as he wanted the Pen­tagon not to hold the prayer event in the first place.

After the Pentagon’s announcement, in a follow-up conversation with Newsweek editor Jon Meacham and religion editor Lisa Miller, Franklin Graham was called out, not only for his “divisive” speech, but also for his lack of tolerance. At one point Graham told Meacham, “I am who I am. I don’t believe that you can get to heaven through being a Buddhist or Hindu. I think Muhammad only leads to the grave. Now, that’s what I believe, and I don’t apolo­gize for my faith. And if it’s divisive, I’m sorry.”

A few moments later, Meacham said, “I think we are an incredibly hospitable country to all faiths. I think that’s a good thing. I don’t know that you do.”

Southern Baptist Seminary President Al Mohler said in a subsequent blog, “As reports make clear, it is not just [Graham’s] statements about Islam being prone to violence that cause offense, it is his statements that Islam is wicked because it does not lead to salvation in Christ that cause the greatest offense…. Faithful wit­ness to Christ requires an honest statement about what any false system of belief represents — a form of idolatry and false teaching that leads to eternal damnation. There may be more and less offensive ways of saying that, but there is no way to remove the basic offense to the current cultural mind. In reality, every evan­gelical preacher and every individual Christian will face this question — and probably sooner rather than later.”

Okay, perhaps you and I will not find ourselves at the center of such a public politi­cal hurricane, but Mr. Mohler is right about our need to face the question. Today, the most politically incorrect statement you could make first came from the lips of Jesus: “I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me” (John 14:6).

I probably need to insert some informa­tion here about the concept of worldview. Worldview is simply what it sounds like — a view of the real world around us. Think of worldview as a lens, the way we see and make sense of the world.

Philosophically, until about 1700, the domi­nant worldview in Europe and the West (includ­ing those who were colonizing what would become the U.S.) was called premodernism.

This worldview embraced the idea of the supernatural, and in particular, the teachings of Christianity regarding God, the Bible, Jesus, and so on. One of the primary reasons for this was the dominance of the Roman Catholic Church, especially before the Protestant Ref­ormation, and in fact another marker for the premodern period was a belief in traditional institutions and the authority they held.

There was a strong concept of revelation — that God had revealed truth concerning Himself and the World, reflected, for instance, in the book of Proverbs with the phrase, “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” Without faith you simply could not under­stand the world and the way things were.

Premoderns embraced what is called a metanar­rative — the Big Story, a comprehensive explanation of the way things are. God created the world. That was the truth. God created us. That was the truth.

The shift from premod­ern to modern began during the explosion of knowl­edge from around 1450-1700. Technology, science, medicine, knowledge about the physical world, exploration, dis­covery — all these things led to a new metanarrative that cared less about the supernatural. Science and academia became the authority for explaining the world — reason over faith, thinking for yourself, distrust of political and religious institutions. It was the time of the Protestant Reformation.

And with the emphasis on science and observation, apologetics became more important, and in some ways this was both good and bad. As skepticism chipped away at basic tenets regarding the origin and accuracy of scripture, those who held to the traditional metanarrative that included a belief in the su­pernatural found themselves obligated as well to provide evidences for belief. Others, sadly, caved to skepticism and sought to accom­modate the Christian message to a world with little regard for anything that smacked of the supernatural, including revelation, miracles, and even the basic teachings concerning the person of Jesus Christ.

In the meantime, a new worldview began to take hold, first in the arts, and then later in all areas of life. The worldview went through several stages and names, but because of its placement in time, we generally refer to it as postmodernism.

Among the features of postmodernism was a near total rejection of all metanarra­tive, along with any notion of universal truth. Truth, if there were such a thing, would be considered only relative or localized. Without any set standard or authority, any version of truth (such as it were) was equally valid.

There are all sorts of downsides connected with a world embracing postmodernism, but there are positive facets. For one thing, postmodernism has room for the concept of the supernatural. For centuries, modernism relegated Christianity to a category of un­proven, unscientific, and unrealistic worldview incompatible with thought — the idea being that there is no way thinking people would accept it. But in a postmodern world, there is a measure of skepticism toward the triumph of human reason over all.

Something else is a reality in the post­modern world — something many suspected but few articulated: science is not as objective and certain as presented, and often is biased, agenda driven, and in some cases, faith based. We will talk more about that in another article.

And there is one more thing making postmodernism interesting to the Christian, and that is a renewed emphasis on story and experience.

Finally, with science off the throne, so to speak, and acceptance of notions of the supernatural and spirituality, the gospel, the Christian story, can take its place alongside other worldviews as “a” truth, but there is a danger here.

A biblical Christian believes that the Big Story, God’s story, is not merely “a” truth, not just one story among many that may or may not be true, but rather we believe the Bible presents the story of God, and God’s story is the story above all others.

And this is the challenge of the postmod­ern worldview for Christians. If you continue to maintain a view that God is God, and that He has revealed His truth in the Bible in a supernatural way (and sadly many in Christen­dom gave that up back during the modernist period), then you are faced with a choice: either be one of several truth options, or dogmatically claim the truth that the faith of God, the Bible, and His Son Jesus Christ is unique, and the only supernatural truth.

There are several reasons to make an exclu­sive claim that Jesus is the only way to God. First of all, though some may try to maintain all religions are basically the same, that notion is a myth. Take just one aspect of religion, say the concept of God, and compare what the various faiths teach, and you can see right away they are not equivalent at all. Christian philosopher Francis Beckwith (who I must point out with sadness recently returned to his Roman Catho­lic upbringing,) in his study of Bahai, compared the doctrines of God as taught by religions and their founders and reported they were hope­lessly contradictory. He wrote, “God cannot be impersonal, personal, transcendent, polythe­istic, pantheistic, monotheistic, able to beget, not able to beget, relevant, and irrelevant all at the same time…. Irreconcilable data gives us no knowledge of God whatsoever.”

One of the unique aspects of Christian­ity is its dependence not on philosophies or mystical teachings, but upon objective truth. Henry Morris, in Many Infallible Proofs, wrote, “Christianity (including its Old Testament foundation) is based upon historical acts and facts. Other religions are centered in the ethi­cal and religious teachings of their founders, but Christianity is built on the great events of creation and redemption.”

To see the importance of this statement, take a look at the content of the Gospels them­selves. There you find the story of the historical Jesus, but instead of an emphasis on his life and teachings, you discover something else. We ac­tually know very little about his life as a whole. Only two of the Gospels tell us anything about the ancestry and birth. It appears that he was 30 years old when he began his public ministry, but we know almost nothing about those 30 years. In fact, the Gospels have four chapters covering events of those earlier years, the rest is devoted to the last three and one half years of the earthly life of Jesus, and about half that describe the last week of life, His death, burial, and resurrection.

The point is, Christianity is based not on the philosophy of Jesus, but upon who He was and what He did, and this makes Him unique as an object of faith. But it does more. The truthfulness of His teachings, and the validity of his statement that He is the only way to God, stand on these historical records which are sub­ject to objective examination. If Jesus was not who He said He was, and did not do what the Bible declares Him to have done, then Christi­anity is not only not unique, it is a sham!

I have already shown that Jesus proclaimed Himself as the only way to God, but after the Gospels, the New Testament tells us that the early followers of Jesus Christ understood this uniqueness as well. It was not something added on later as an act of deliberate intolerance and ignorance.

Standing before people who held to the Jewish faith, mere days after the crucifixion and resurrection, Peter makes this statement: “Be it known unto you all, and to all the people of Israel, that by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom ye crucified, whom God raised from the dead…Neither is there salvation in any other: for there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved” (Acts 4:10-12).

Later in the book, in chapter 17, the Apostle Paul, whose conversion to Christ was recorded in Acts 9, stood before a group of Greek philosophers and told them, contrary to their own native beliefs, there was only one God, and that God commanded them to re­pent, otherwise they would be judged by “that man whom he hath ordained; whereof he hath given assurance unto all men, in that he hath raised him from the dead” (Acts 17:31). The man raised from the dead, the one who would one day be their judge, was of course, Jesus Christ.

The message is clear — whether one claims an ancient monotheistic faith that goes back to the days of Moses, or even if one has an ultimate faith that makes room for hundreds of gods — Jesus, Peter, and Paul, and all those who followed from the earliest days of Christi­anity say the same thing: Jesus is the only way to God. No amount of religious contortion can make the Bible say anything else, and you can make that claim with good reason.