At the time I was in the midst of an unwitting journey from being a convinced exclusivist to what could be called ‘an uneasy exclusivist’, and all I could think to say was, "Well, we don’t have all the answers on this difficult issue, but what we do know is that God will never treat anyone in a way that is unfair or unjust, so we can only leave these sorts of questions up to him."

Looking back I still think my answer was basically correct and certainly more generous than many an exclusivist would have given. But what it did not do was to face this major issue squarely and seek to answer some of its very disturbing implications.

Perhaps most disturbing is the fact that we evangelicals have come up with a belief system which forces us to have to regard the countless numbers of truly good, loving and generous non-Christians in a manner which is at best patronising and condescending and at worst appallingly arrogant and deeply unjust. What’s more, it causes fair-minded non-Christians to regard the Christian God as the source of such attitudes.

It is high time that we started to face up to this issue and the great injustices that our doctrines perpetrate against the vast numbers of truly good and decent non-Christian people.

Important: In order to fully grasp what this article is endeavouring to say and all the reasonings behind it, please first carefully read the main article in this Inclusive Christianity section entitled The Broadness of Salvation.

A Classic Example of the Typical Evangelical Mind-set

In a recent ‘Planet Guides’ TV documentary on the US state of New England, the interviewer talked to a group of Christian motor cycle enthusiasts. During the course of the brief discussion one of the Christian women came out with a classic evangelical claim. Reflecting on how a person becomes a Christian, she said with great conviction, "It’s got nothing to do with being good, you only have to ‘believe in Jesus’."

This woman’s comment illustrates clearly one of the biggest mistakes that evangelicals make in regard to the issue of ‘on what basis’ God accepts people into relationship with himself.

It is important to realise that this discussion is all about the actual entry point into salvation. Evangelicals will rightly stress the fact that good works are a sign that a person actually has been saved, and will look on them as ‘the fruit of salvation’. But they strongly deny that goodness on its own, no matter how amazing, plays any role whatsoever in bringing any person into a relationship with God. They call this ‘salvation by works’ and totally reject any such possibility.

They teach, as the Christian biker woman was to say, that to receive ‘salvation’ you must first ‘believe in Jesus.’ By this they mean that a person must be able to agree with and believe the teaching that Jesus is God and that he died on the cross to forgive our sins. In the light of this the individual must commit to Christ and ask him to take control of their life. Evangelicals assert that the Bible teaches that since the death of Christ on the Cross this is the only way a person comes into a valid saving relationship with God. It does not matter how genuinely loving and compassionate a person may have been during their life. If they fail to ‘believe in Jesus’ (in the way described above) they will be judged by Christ and end up spending eternity in hell.