In this episode I deal with one of the biggest issues that Christians face when it comes to other faith traditions in the world. Especially when they start to get to know people of other faiths and read their scriptures and other writings of non-Christian religions with an open mind. The question is this: Is Jesus Christ the only way to salvation? Framed another way, “Do you have to believe in Jesus to be saved?” The traditional Christian answer is “Yes.” I say, “Not so fast. Let’s look at what Jesus really says.”
In this episode I deal with one of the biggest issues that Christians face when it comes to other faith traditions in the world. Especially when they start to get to know people of other faiths and read their scriptures and other writings of non-Christian religions with an open mind. The question is this: Is Jesus Christ the only way to salvation? Framed another way, “Do you have to believe in Jesus to be saved?” The traditional Christian answer is “Yes.” I say, “Not so fast. Let’s look at what Jesus really says.”
Is Jesus the Only Way?
Today I am going to deal with one of the biggest issues that Christians face when it comes to other faith traditions in the world. Especially when they start to get to know people of other faiths and read their scriptures and other writings of non-Christian religions with an open mind. The question is this: Is Jesus Christ the only way to salvation? Framed another way, “Do you have to believe in Jesus to be saved?”
The traditional Christian answer is “Yes.” The Catechism of the Catholic Church puts it this way: Outside the Church there is no salvation. Evangelicals point to the words of Scripture, especially two verses. One is in the book of Acts where Peter is reported to have said, “Salvation exists in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved.” Then there are the famous words of Jesus himself, “I am the way, the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father except through Me.” As the old fundamentalist slogan goes, “The Bible says it, I believe it, and that settles it”
I say, “Not so fast. Let’s look at what Jesus really says.” What is the context? This famous saying in the 14th chapter of the Gospel of John is part of the farewell address that Jesus gives to his disciples the night before he dies. The sermon stretches for several chapters but these words are found near the beginning.
Before it are words often spoken at funerals: “Let not your heart be troubled; you believe in God, believe also in Me. In My Father’s house are many mansions; if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you to Myself; that where I am, there you may be also.”
Harvey Cox, the famous theologian of Harvard Divinity School, wrote a book in 1988 entitled “Many Mansions: A Christian's Encounter with Other Faiths.” In that book he says that in that phrase many mansions refers to the different religions of the world. A few chapters back Jesus referred to having sheep who are not of this fold. That was referring to people of other faiths.
We see Jesus praising people of other faiths constantly. He refers to the faith of a Roman centurion, who was not a Jew or a Christian, saying, “Truly I tell you, I have not found anyone in Israel with such great faith. I say to you that many will come from the east and the west to share the banquet with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven.” We saw the same type of thing with the Samaritan woman at the well. It was the meaning of the visit of the Magi to the Christ child.
It is present in the stories of the Syro-Phoenician woman (also called Canaanite woman), the Samaritan leper, as well as Jesus’ encounters with people from the Decapolis who were not Jewish. Then there is his famous parable of the Good Samaritan. These are not just people of different ethnic heritage; these were people of different religious faiths. That aspect of the stories is routinely ignored by Christian preachers.
Jesus is continually using people of other faiths as examples of godly persons. One’s cultural tradition – including one’s religious beliefs and practices - did not matter at all to Jesus. What did matter was that people could see beyond the confines of their own religion. In fact it was the self-righteous people of his own religion that he called children of the devil, and he said they would not enter the Kingdom of God. Jesus did not mince words when dealing with people who excluded others for religious reasons.
When you look at the whole testimony of Jesus, and not just pluck verses out of context to shore up one’s own religious prejudices, then one sees that declaring himself to be “the way, the truth and the life” has nothing to do with religious systems. When Jesus said, “no one comes to the Father except through Me” he was not trumpeting his religion over others. He was not excluding non-Christians from the Kingdom of Heaven. If he had been, he would have been no better than the Pharisees. Then what was he saying?
We need to always remember that when Jesus speaks in the Gospel of John, he is speaking as the Eternal Logos. In the opening words of the Gospel we are told that Jesus is the Eternal Word who is God. That is who is speaking in all the I AM sayings. The fact that he calls himself the I AM points to that. This is not one human being elevating himself above others. That would have been very unchristlike. Jesus just finished washing his disciples’ feet to demonstrate the opposite of that. This is the Eternal Word saying that you have to come through his eternal identity as the I AM to know God.
That becomes clear when we read the rest of the statement and not cut him off in mid thought. After he says he is the Way, the Truth and the Life, he takes a breath and says, “If you had known Me, you would have known My Father also; from now on you know Him, and have seen Him.” This is a variation on Jesus’ statement that he and the Father are one. If you know one, you know the other. Jesus is saying that he is identical with God.
Jesus gets into a conversation with his disciple Philip at this point and makes this clear. Jesus says to him, “I am in the Father, and the Father is in Me. The words that I say to you I do not speak on My own, but the Father, as He abides in Me, does His works. Believe Me that I am in the Father and the Father is in Me.”
This leads Jesus to talk about the Holy Spirit. He continues, “I will ask the Father, and He will give you another Helper [Comforter, Counselor], so that He may be with you forever; the Helper is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it does not see Him or know Him; but you know Him because He remains with you and will be in you.”
Jesus talks about himself, the Holy Spirit and the Father, so this is probably a good time to say a word about the Trinity and how it fits into this. This is not the complex theological doctrine came centuries later. Here Jesus is simply using different words for the Divine. Put simply, the Father is Divine transcendence. The Spirit is Divine immanence. And of course the Son is divine incarnation - the experience of God incarnated a human being.
That is an oversimplification of course. Each of those terms shares aspects of the others. For example he also says the Father is in him, so the Father can be seen as an inner presence also. In any case these three are all one. That is the trinity. They are the same God, nondual. The Father is the Spirit. Transcendence is immanence. Brahman is Atman. This is also our nature as human incarnation. That is the meaning of the Son – which Jesus calls both the Son of God and the Son of Man - Divine and human. Two are one. You are one with this God. That thou art.
Jesus also mentions the coming of the Holy Spirit and the Second Coming. Those two are also one. Jesus says here, “‘I am going away, and I am coming to you.” The Holy Spirt is called elsewhere in the NT the Spirit of Jesus. In the synoptic Gospels – Matthew, Mark and Luke, as well as the Pauline writings – the Second Coming is interpreted as a personal physical return of the man Jesus. But that is not the case in the Gospel of John. In chapter 14 Jesus says that he is going away, but he returns in the resurrection and in the Spirit to be with this disciples always.
In the Gospel of John, the giving of the Holy Spirit and the Second Coming happen right after the resurrection of Jesus. In chapter 20 the risen Christ breathes on the disciples and says to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit.” This is known by scholars as the Johannine Pentecost. The author of the Gospel of John is reinterpreting both the Second Coming and Pentecost as the presence of God with us and in us.
In the Gospel of John, the coming of the Holy Spirit and the Second Coming of Christ are both fulfilled when we are united with the Father and Christ in the Spirit. This he calls peace, “Peace I leave you, My peace I give you; not as the world gives, do I give to you.” John’s Gospel is truly nondualistic in a way that the other gospels are not.
So back to the original question posed by this chapter: Is Jesus Christ the only way? If you mean “do you have to be a Christian to enter the Kingdom of God?, the answer is no. The Kingdom is bigger than any one religion. As Jesus said after praising the faith of the Roman centurion, “I say to you that many will come from the east and the west to share the banquet with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven.” That is the Way, the Truth and the Life. Many religions, one Truth.
But if you see Jesus speaking here as the Eternal Logos, the I AM, the answer is Yes. It is only through the I AM that anyone of any religion enters the Kingdom of God. I AM is the Eternal Name of Christ. “For there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved.” That is the strait gate and narrow way.
When Jesus says I AM the Way, the Truth and the Life, he means the narrow way of I AM. Not the narrow-mindedness of “I am this” or “I am that” that we find in religious fundamentalism. This is not propositional Truth found in doctrines. I AM is strait and narrow in a spiritual sense. The only way to squeeze through that narrow gate is to shed one’s ego including egoic religion – to shed one’s human self until we are no more, and there is only God. When there is only I AM, that is the Realm of God. That is the Kingdom of Heaven.