This is perhaps the most important single spiritual/religious issue to confront the religions of the world today. And its impact, as we see demonstrated on our TV news night after night, profoundly affects the entire planet.

I and many others believe that almighty God is forcing the pace and challenging those of all religions to face up to the immaturity, tribalism (‘my tribe is better than your tribe’) and downright stupidity of such exclusivism. The pressure is on us all to rediscover the God whose mercy is truly like the wideness of the sea and whose love is truly broader than the measure of our at times narrow and over-zealous minds.

What is so encouraging, if we can but remove our large evangelical blinkers, is that we will find that the Bible, when taken as a whole, reveals a God very much like the generous, open-hearted deity of Fredrick Faber’s wonderful hymn.

CHRISTIAN ‘SALVATION DOCTRINES’ EXPLAINED

Over the past one hundred and fifty years in particular the views Christians hold as to the broadness of salvation have divided off into three ‘camps’.

They are, in order of popularity:
1) The Exclusivist view
2) The Inclusivist view
3) The Pluralist / Universalist view

Given that the purpose of this article is to concentrate more fully on the majority Exclusivist and Inclusivist views, I will simply outline very briefly the later minority Pluralist/Universalist view.

The Pluralist / Universalist view

As these two views are very close cousins and most pluralists would espouse universalist views I will treat them together. Put simply, Christians of this persuasion hold that somehow everyone will be saved and that as a general principle God is at work equally within all major world religions. Every major religion is, therefore, more or less equally valid and provides its adherents with a valid path to God, although it would be acknowledged that some paths make the journey clearer and so are, in that sense, easier than others. Pluralism looks askance at any missionary endeavour which seeks to convert someone from one major faith to another.

While not holding to this guiding pluralist belief, I do agree with pluralists’ conviction that every faith has something to learn from the others, and with their advocacy of a level of sharing sufficiently open and honest to enable any faith to feel it could engraft something helpful and enriching learnt from another faith.

It is important to realise that the vast majority of western societies and western governments operate from a ‘pluralist’ stance. A healthy pluralism is the necessary dominant and over-riding social glue which rightly allows peoples of widely diverse ethnic and religious traditions to live together in relative harmony.

People of pluralist/universalist persuasion are scattered among the congregations of the more liberal Christian churches. They may hold such beliefs without ever having heard the terms or labelling themselves as such.

The Exclusivist View of Salvation

Note: I fully recognise that not all evangelicals hold to the views described and criticised in this article, and this fact in itself is a hopeful sign. I stress that it is the essential evangelical bed-rock doctrines and teachings around the question of ‘how we enter into, and live in, right relationship with God’ which are examined in this article, along with the spin-offs that these views produce in the thinking and attitudes of those evangelicals who accept them in an uncritical manner.

Exclusivism has been the traditional evangelical/pentecostal salvation view, and is still held by the vast majority of people from this tradition. This is the view I was raised on and the doctrinal basis from which I preached during all the years I spent in pastoral ministry. The exclusivist view is essentially as follows.