The Uniqueness of Christianity?

Week beginning 20 February 2005

I got into a spot of bother last week, following my remarks about nonconformist churches in England. One brother wrote me suggesting that I was insulting many Christians with my reporting of the downgrade in many of the mainstream denominations. I was not intending to sling mud, simply trying to analyse a phenomenon which makes English evangelicalism so very different to Scottish evangelicalism.

When all is said and done, however, there is an issue which is increasingly going to concern all Christians, no matter what denomination they belong to. In our pluriform, multifaith world, is there any room anywhere to maintain the traditional orthodox doctrine of the uniqueness of Christianity? Is it possible for us, in other words, to maintain our view that biblical Christianity stands alone in claiming that it offers the only way to God?

It does seem a very high-handed claim, particularly with so much emphasis in our contemporary society on tolerance and inclusion. We are encouraged to think in terms of diversity of belief, culture and practice: Scottishness is a coat of many colours. Surely only the most narrow-minded fundamentalist can make the claim in today's society that Christianity is different, because it alone is validated by God?

Yet that is the claim Christians have consistently made, ever since Jesus himself described himself as the only way to the Father. The apostles fearlessly declared that there is no other name under Heaven among men -- not Buddha, or Muhammed, or Joseph Smith, or Karl Marx, or the Pope -- by which we can be saved: unless our trust is absolutely and only in Jesus Christ, we shall perish for ever.

Disturbing as it is to see the secular world rejecting the claims of Christ to be unique and the only way to God, it is even more disturbing to see it within the professing evangelical church itself. This is the subject of a recent book by a young academic, Daniel Strange, who analyses the thinking of Clark Pinnock in this area. Strange's book, The Possibility of Salvation Among the Unevangelised, focusses on Pinnock because of his influence on evangelicalism and because of his nuancing of many of its doctrines.

But how is it possible to begin with the Bible and end up with an inclusivist position that argues that it is possible for the unevangelised to be saved by Christ even though they have not heard of him? Strange tries to understand Pinnock's position before critiquing it. He suggests that because the Bible speaks of God not being willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance, and because it mandates us to preach the Gospel throughout all the world, there is an optimism here that warrants us to imagine that the effects of the cross are not as truncated as evangelicals have traditionally held out.

It seems, however, that to reach an inclusivist position, Pinnock has to alter the basis of the Gospel to such an extent that it is questionable whether his evangelicalism itself is biblical. He wants to argue, for example, that all of God's actions in history are potentially saving: common grace in the lives of all men everywhere has that possibility. He wants to reject a penal view of the atonement in favour of a personal one. He wants to argue that God the Father, rather than God the Son, is the primary subject of Scripture. And in all of this, he is trying to blend the particular with the general: arguing that the saving act of God in Christ can be the basis of a hope that the unevangelised will eventually be saved.

All of this is a remarkable tour de force from within the evangelical camp, and is light years away from both the doctrine and the practice of the New Testament. Would the early Christians have risked life and limb to bring the Gospel to all the world if, to use Pinnock's phrase, there is such a wideness in God's mercy? Would the great missionary movements, which drew their impulse from the evangelical revivals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, ever have happened? And could Spurgeon, or Lloyd-Jones, or Al Martin, have sustained generation-long evangelical ministries were it not for the biblical insistence that only by hearing the Word can faith in Christ come?

This is no mere academic exercise. The energy of the church has been sustained by the empowering grace of God, which has given us the Christ-centered message of the cross to proclaim to all men. We are still bound by the terms of the Great Commission. Never once does the New Testament hint that common grace is enough to save men: marvelling at a winter sunrise, according to Paul, is enough to condemn us for our spiritual blindness, but is not enough to open our eyes.

Yet the pressure is on, and many church leaders are capitulating to it. In this day of commonality, inclusion and multi-culture, will we who are evangelical be strong enough to withstand the torrent, and defend the uniqueness of Christ? Will we be noted for our jealousy, in all our Gospel-preaching churches, for the central tenet of biblical religion: that there is only one name by which we can be saved -- the name of Jesus Christ.

? Iain D. Campbell 2005