“Is Jesus the only way to know God?” A look at how Christianity doesn’t have to be the exclusive path to God.

I remember when I first became aware of the fact that people had different ways of worshiping.  It was the first time I went with some friends to a service at the Nazarene Church.  I was maybe 8.  What I noticed were the unmistakable variations in prayers, hymns and preaching.  I came home and asked my mom about it and she said that just because someone is Christian it doesn’t mean they worship in the same way.

It was when I was in college that I got exposed to other faiths and their worship.  It was during my “Christianity is a bad religion I have to find something better” phase that I went to a Moony retreat, Krishna dinner, Buddhist prayer group, Native American experiences, etc.  I didn’t find anything better than Christianity so I returned to the United Methodist Church but I did notice that these others were sincere, faithful and had genuine experiences of the Holy.  I saw the Spirit among these diverse groups and ways of worship.  I came face to face with the reality that the exclusive claims of Christianity didn’t mesh with these very real world encounters with other faiths and their adherents.

I began to adopt what Brian McLaren calls a “benign – sentimental Christian identity”.  I worked hard to keep my faith from offending others by watering it down or apologizing for it or trying to explain its brutal treatment of others as a phase that we were outgrowing.  When that became hard to manage because many Christians were becoming even more hostile to those of other denominations and faiths I began to try and say that my Christianity, while still very similar to theirs, was more in tune with Jesus.  My goal was to try and lessen the exclusiveness and hostility of Christianity by changing words, dropping words, ignoring whole sections of the Bible and allowing for “good” people regardless of their faith or no faith a pass to get into heaven.  September 11, 2001 changed all that.

It wasn’t that one day or the events of it but it was the moment in time when I finally had had enough and owned what I had long been suppressing, all faiths have problems and all faiths have worthy elements and there isn’t one way to know experience and be with God.  I realized what Gandhi meant when he said, “I like your Christ, I don’t like your Christians.  Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.”  I also realized that you could substitute any religion in that quote and I would bet Gandhi would agree.  So this brought me to a very real crisis of faith.  If I asked myself, “Is Jesus is the only way to know God?” I would give myself the answer, “No, many paths lead to God.”

I was feeling that I had to stop being a member of the Christian Clergy.  How could I be a pastor and not believe in what I thought was the fundamental belief of Christianity – Jesus is the only way to know God?  I do not have the time to share with you the journey I undertook to get to where I am today.  Suffice it to say that a lot of reading, soul searching, Bible study, prayer, conferencing with others, contemplation, reflection, and reasoning brought me to a place where I can say without hesitation or qualification that I am a Christian who believes in “Jesus as the Way, the Truth, and the Life” and that Christianity is only one of many paths to God.  I firmly believe that your path to God may not be the path of others.  I have come to the place where I feel you must be confident in your path while allowing others their paths and that this requires you to have strength and a strong faith and deep trust in whatever you perceive God to be.

J.B. Phillips wrote a book Your God Is Too Small that you can find on the internet and download free.  In the introduction he writes:
The trouble with many people today is that they have not found a God big enough for modern needs. While their experience of life has grown in a score of directions, and their mental horizons have been expanded to the point of bewilderment by world events and by scientific discoveries, their ideas of God have remained largely static.

It is obviously impossible for an adult to worship the conception of God that exists in the mind of a child of Sunday-school age, unless he is prepared to deny his own experience of life. If, by a great effort of will, he does do this he will always be secretly afraid lest some new truth may expose the juvenility of his faith. And it will always be by such an effort that he either worships or serves a God who is really too small to command his adult loyalty and cooperation.

It often appears to those outside the Churches that this is precisely the attitude of Christian people. If they are not strenuously defending an outgrown conception of God, then they are cherishing a hothouse God who could only exist between the pages of the Bible or inside the four walls of a Church. Therefore to join in with the worship of a Church would be to become a party to a piece of mass-hypocrisy and to buy a sense of security at the price of the sense of truth, and many men of goodwill will not consent to such a transaction.

It cannot be denied that there is a little truth in this criticism. There are undoubtedly professing Christians with childish conceptions of God which could not stand up to the winds of real life for five minutes. But Christians are by no means always unintelligent, naive, or immature. Many of them hold a faith in God that has been both purged and developed by the strains and perplexities of modern times, as well as by a small but by no means negligible direct experience of God Himself. They have seen enough to know that God is immeasurably “bigger” than our forefathers imagined, and modern scientific discovery only confirms their belief that man has only just begun to comprehend the incredibly complex Being who is behind what we call “life.”

Many men and women today are living, often with inner dissatisfaction, without any faith in God at all. This is not because they are particularly wicked or selfish or, as the old-fashioned would say, “godless,” but because they have not found with their adult minds a God big enough to “account for” life, big enough to “fit in with” the new scientific age, big enough to command their highest admiration and respect, and consequently their willing co-operation.
When you require someone to say that Jesus is the only way to know God you are perpetuating the type of Christian belief that J.B. Phillips is describing here.

I believe that Jesus is a definitive revelation of God, showing us God’s true character of love and grace, acceptance and compassion.  I believe that by living life as Jesus calls us to and as he demonstrated we will be what God wants and needs us to be.  Faithful living is working for justice for all people, it is loving others – all others, it is practicing and living peace, but it doesn’t rest on your religious affiliation.  People of faith have to find a way to live and work together.  We cannot let the radical and conservative elements dictate how we live and work together.  Are you able to see the Jew, Muslim, Hindu, Mormon, Buddhist, humanist, etc as faithful people on a legitimate path to God and salvation?  Can you move beyond the hostile world view that has been a part of Christianity – the “us” and “them” mentality?  Only when you can, when we can, will the world have a chance to be transformed into the universe God envisions.  We must find ways to work with other faithful people so that transformation of ourselves and the world can happen.

Being faithful isn’t about whom you believe in or believing the correct things.  Faithful living is living faithfully God’s call to love and serve and bring justice and peace.  When people love, serve, and work for peace and justice God is there.  The faith tradition is not critical, our religious affiliation isn’t important.  If the intent of our hearts and souls and minds are guided by a sense of the compassion, the love and the grace of God that is enough.