The Narrow Way: Gracing the Whole World

The most exclusive claims about Jesus as the only way and teachings about Hell come from Jesus’ own teachings as recorded by all four Gospels. So if we are to take Jesus and the four Gospels seriously, we must reckon with these as his claims, not those of a later generation of church leaders. Paul’s, Peter’s, James’, and John’s epistles and Revelation reinforce these claims. If we take Scripture seriously as received from the Apostles and the Church fathers, we cannot and should not ignore these hard teachings of our Lord, nor should we abdicate to the “critical scholarship” from Jefferson to Bultmann to Bishop Spong that would create an enlightened Jesus that conforms to the image and likeness of modern man.

Nor is this exclusivity an Evangelical, much less a North American Evangelical conviction. It was the dominant belief of the early Church, the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Communions that emerged from the early church, and most if not all of the Protestant denominations until the advent of 19^th Century critical scholarship that, following the method of modern science, excludes all explanations by divine intervention, thus reaches the fore-drawn conclusion that claims of miracles including resurrection from the dead have to be understood as primitive ways of explaining extraordinary natural phenomena or downright falsehoods .

So if Evangelicals hold along with most of the broader Christian traditions the exclusive claims of Jesus, how does such a view shape our understanding of and relationships with those of other religions and of no faith at all? If we take our lead from Jesus and the early disciples, the claims of Jesus on all of our lives should cause us to transcend the usual ways we classify, diminish and demean one another. Or as St. Paul wrote, “In Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female. We are all one in him.” In other words, the way the early church treated all those “others” was as fellow sinners created in the image of God and redeemed by the death and resurrection of Jesus. Evangelicals are called to share the good news in this spirit of grace and love, not self-righteousness and condescension. As Peter taught in 1 Peter “always be ready to make your defense to anyone who demands an accounting for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and reverence.” In other words, defend your faith in Christ whenever the opportunities present themselves, but do not be defensive.

Now I confess that the history of the church and our personal lives have too often not lived up to the teaching or example of the Apostles. From the mutual antagonisms between the medieval Church and the then-young Muslim world, the inquisitions and treatment of Jews, the complicity with colonialism’s subjugation of aboriginal peoples, to the Salem witch trials, the Church has failed at times on a grand scale to live and preach the Gospel in the spirit of “gentleness and reverence.” When we have sinned against God and our neighbors in this way we act self-righteously, not Christ-righteously, as if we owned the Gospel and earned God’s grace. So we must join those who have been coerced and persecuted by the various christendoms over the centuries in renouncing such attitudes and actions while treating them as cautionary stories that remind us how easily we slide back into dehumanizing others by way of our ethnic, religious, economic, or gender biases.

Speaking from my own experience of inter-denominational and inter-faith dialogues as well as people of no religious faith, I have found people very open to my “witnessing” to them. By witnessing I do not mean attacking their beliefs, playing manipulative games with them, or forcing Christ down their throats. I mean what courts mean when the judge reminds the person being questioned by attorneys to stay with what they saw, heard, and experienced. I have engaged in public “debates” with Catholic priests and a Buddhist monk that were not arguments to entertain an audience but authentic conversations that helped each of us understand one another’s faith; they witnessed and I witnessed. I did not try to do the work of the Holy Spirit in their lives or presume that I cared more about them than God does.

One of my most memorable experiences of giving witness to my faith in Christ was serving on an inter-faith panel in “The Future of Religion” organized by The Festival of Ideas in Dallas, Texas a few years ago. The panel, moderated by New York Times religion writer Mark Oppenheimer, included Catholic scholars, a local imam, and me. Mark gave an initial presentation of the changes since World War II from a fairly homogenous religious landscape to an amazing diversity today. He said that there has not been a decline in a belief in God, but there has been a decline in denominational loyalties with many people calling themselves spiritual but not religious. We enjoyed a respectful and robust discussion, which included my being asked to explain Evangelicals to an audience that largely stereotyped us through the lens of TV evangelists and right-wing fundamentalists. Toward the end of the conversation, someone asked the panelist if they don’t resent Evangelicals witnessing to them about Christ. Mark, a Jew, quickly responded no, quite the opposite. He went on to explain that he has soe close friends who are Evangelical Christians who love Jesus and love him and want their two loves to come together. He added that he does not believe what they believe but considers it the highest form of love that they should want him to share in what gives their life meaning and purpose.

Many Evangelicals today, tired of the right-wing, hateful, and often obnoxious image of our kind are simply trying to love our neighbors and our enemies, to take care of the homeless, the widows and orphans, and to care for the aliens among us without mentioning the reason we do so. Recently, Scot McKnight challenged a group of Gordon College students to distinguish between such ministry to the least among us and that done by a secular non-profit or NGO if Christ is never named. Do we end up, like Flannery O’Connor’s protagonist in Wise Blood, Hazel Motes, who declares, “Nobody with a good car needs to be justified by Jesus.”? Later Hazel founds “The Church without Christ.” In our fear that naming his name might offend some, which we are told by Christ and the Apostles it will, are we becoming ashamed of Him?

Christ is the narrow way and the only way and at the same time Christ is open to all and seeks all, not just those who are holy, ascetics, and respectable. I love the image of the stable in C.S. Lewis’s The Last Battle. That stable that once housed a false Aslan, a donkey covered with a lion’s fur, becomes a place of terror and death, as people are thrown in one by one to what they think is certain death. But instead, because Aslan is inside, that narrow door opens up to a transformed world in which the inside is infinitely bigger than the outside, welcoming and embracing people and creatures from all creation, including those who were once enemies. We need more such winsome and imaginative Evangelical witness.