The Gospel’s Inclusive Reach

One of the highlights of my now eight-year career teaching in a seminary has been participating in several public dialogues with “liberal” (their choice of term) theologians from a nearby, mainline seminary. These events were billed as “evangelical-liberal dialogues,” with the intention of pursuing a path beyond an all-too-common gridlock. The topic was salvation and the question of the exclusivity of Jesus.

These frank but friendly discussions illuminated for me some differences between how “evangelical theologians” and “liberal theologians” work through the question of salvation and how we wrestle, in differing ways, with the Christian tradition’s claims to the ultimacy of Christ in a pluralistic and increasingly post-Christian context.  They also gave me appreciation for some points of contact and areas of overlap between us, even hints at a way forward.

On the differences, my liberal counterparts suggested that the mere fact of the plurality of religious perspectives and experiences forces on us a normative conclusion: any claims to exclusivity are nullified by the sheer reality of religious pluralism. One theologian suggested that religious commitment is like marriage. In marriage, one choses to commit or remain committed to a spouse; this is a deeply subjective and particularized phenomenon; a marriage is a unique, personal, and meaningful (hopefully) phenomenon. Analogously, then, religions function to provide unique, personal, and meaningful relationships with the divine. For some of us, Jesus is Lord. But Jesus is not everyone’s Lord. There are other—perhaps even equally valid—options. On the soteriology spectrum, my dialogue partner represented the pluralist position. Particular religions are historical instantiations of humanity’s varied, contextual experiences of “God.”

I don’t know of any evangelical theologians, however progressive on the spectrum one might be, affirming pluralism in this stark form. Evangelical theologians are not generally open to the idea of the intepretation of religion as equally valid windows divine reality. Evangelical Christians generally insist that the trinitarian God is the God who has been made known–albeit in diverse, unfolding, contextual ways–throughout the history of revelation and redemption. For evangelical theologians, anyone who is “saved” (united to God and redeemed from sin) is saved through and because of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. The question—and one that evangelical theologians seem increasingly open to considering—is whether conscious awareness and knowledge of Jesus and the Christian gospel is necessary to be positively and redemptively related to the one true God and Jesus Christ whom he has sent (Jn 17:3).

Exclusivists insist that explicit, conscious, and cognitive (even if minimal) knowledge of Jesus Christ is necessary for a person to be saved. If anyone does not possess this cognitive knowledge, they die without hope and are presumably eternally lost. This life is our “one shot,” to cite the motor-city poet.  

There are very few—if any—thoroughgoing, absolutely consistent exclusivists. Honest exclusivists recognize the challenge of the hard cases; this results in the granting of exceptions to the rule. What about Old Testament saints—presumably none of who knew about Jesus Christ in their lifetimes? What about the “man or woman on the island” who never had a chance to hear the gospel? What about infants who die? What about the mentally incapacitated—or victims of brain trauma? What about schizophrenics who can’t tell the “voice” of Jesus from that of Satan? What about victims of abuse who learned the “gospel” from their abusers?  What gospel do they actually have? What Jesus—and what gospel–do they know?

These hard cases suggest that “accidental” features of history and of situations outside one’s choosing ought not be the determining factor of one’s eternal destiny. Perhaps more importantly, they suggest that the gospel cannot be reduced to propositional truths, or to cognitive information, which becomes mere currency in an economic transaction (understanding and acceptance of the “gospel” as the price which purchases the product called salvation). And Jesus himself seemed to believe the gospel was not primarily about accepting cognitive propositions (Luke 4:18-19; Matt. 25:31-46; John 5:31-40), but about God’s grace of salvation, involving relational knowledge, which results in transformed lives and societies. 

As I see it, to be an exlusivist with exceptions is essentially to be an inclusivist. It seems, then, that we’re all (evangelical Christians) inclusivists. The question is how many exceptions one grants? How “wide” is God’s mercy? How accessible is God’s grace? But furthermore, the question is what kind of “knowledge” is involved in salvation? Is it primarily a cognitive, intellectual and propositional kind, or an existential, relational, and experiential kind (I suspect the “knowledge” of God involves both—but it is not up to any of us to determine with certainty who “has” it and what limitations God imposes—is there a “statute of limitations” for repentance, faith and forgiveness? Is this life—this history—our one shot?  

The gospel is by nature inclusive, because it is an invitation to the world (Jn 3:16). The fundamental flaw of those who resisted Jesus’ understanding of the kingdom is that they treated it as an exclusive message. Certain people, they insisted, were left out of the good news. Only the “elect” were privileged to receive it. Lesslie Newbign’s articulation of election (The Open Secret) seems spot on: election signified responsibility to bring the message of the gospel to the world; thus, election was for the purpose of the expansion of the kingdom and of salvation—not for the privilege of protecting it for oneself.

Scripture asserts that God desires that all be saved and come to knowledge of the truth; God’s patience is evidence of that (1 Tim 2:4; 2 Peter 3:9). If Scripture interprets Scripture, how can we not take this very seriously and let it penetrate our thinking and let it shape our theologies, our hope for humanity and creation? While it need not press us into a dogmatic, theological universalism (indeed: it could be the case that, for all of eternity, God will not get what God wants), it surely speaks to God’s intention for the gospel’s inclusive, expansive reach. Should we impose limits on that inclusivity or resist that expansiveness?

What seems indisputable from the perspective of evangelical Christianity is the centrality of the gospel as good news and of the uniqueness of Christ as the revelation of God in history. The exclusivity of Christ—in the sense of Christ’s irrefutable and irreducible uniqueness—actually highlights the gospel’s inclusive intentions. It is through the particularity of this individual person as the “icon” of God (Heb. 1:3) that God’s message of grace is disseminated to the world and that God’s project of reconciliation is funded. In my view, to emphasize claims to exclusivity as a boundary marker clearly delineating the kingdom, and then determining, on that basis, those who “belong,” is to miss the point of the gospel. Rather, evangelical Christians should let our conviction about Christ’s centrality as the revelation of God motivate us to share, live, and witness to the message of God’s reconciliation with humanity and promised redemption of the cosmos by extending Christ’s presence in the world—by being the “peace” of Christ in a violent world. We should reserve judgment regarding the eternal fate of any and every person completely and entirely up to God. Finally, we ought not be trying to convert people to evangelical Christianity. Rather, we ought to render witness by our lives, our love, our joy, and yes, by our words too, to Christ and the Spirit. In the spirit of John the Baptist, let us decrease, so that he might increase.  

In the end, the line that might separate evangelical Christians from “liberal” Christians is an insistence that the God we proclaim is truly the Lord, creator and potentially the redeemer of all. However, we might also recognize that conviction is not the same as epistemological certainty. The claims of Christianity are eschatologically verified. This should provide us both with the confidence to say we “believe” and the humility to insert a parenthesis: but we could be wrong. The balance of conviction and humility would create an evangelical Christianity that is capable of living peaceable with our neighbors as this pluralistic society pulses forward.