The Architecture of Redemption · Christology and Soteriology
Article 2 of 5
The Only Way
The exclusivity of Christ is the claim modern hearers find hardest and Scripture states most plainly. Examined honestly, it turns out to be the narrowest gate and the widest invitation ever issued.
5 min read · 6 passages · 4 sections
In this article · 4 sections
No Christian doctrine is resented more than this one. That Jesus should be a way to God is unobjectionable; that He should be the way is felt as an act of aggression against everyone else's sincerity. The charge is arrogance, and it deserves a serious answer rather than a defensive one.
Begin by noticing where the claim originates. It is not a later hardening by an institution protecting its position. It comes from Christ, in the plainest sentence He ever spoke about Himself.
(KJV)
Thomas had asked how to find the way. The answer replaces a route with a Person, and then closes every alternative.
The apostles did not soften it
Peter, standing before the very council that had executed Jesus weeks earlier () and in a position where a small concession would have cost him nothing, makes the claim more absolute rather than less.
(KJV)
Paul says the same thing in the language of mediation. Between a holy God and a guilty race there is a gap, and the question is who can stand in it.
(KJV)
One God, and one mediator — the arithmetic is the argument.
The Exegetical Nexus
ὁδός (hodos) · G3598
A road or way. Christ does not say He knows the way or teaches it; He says He is it. The definite article does the work — not a road among roads, but the road. It is worth noting that the earliest name for the Christian movement, before the word Christian existed, was simply the Way ().
More on ὁδός · G3598 →The common misreading
It is arrogant to claim that one religion is right and all others are wrong.
It would be, if the claim originated with us. But the Christian is not asserting the superiority of his own insight; he is reporting what he has been told, and reporting it precisely because he did not invent it. Note also that the alternative is not humility but a different exclusive claim: to say all roads lead to God is itself to declare that every religion insisting otherwise is mistaken — which is a great deal more sweeping than anything a Christian says. The question cannot be settled by tone. Either a real event happened in Jerusalem or it did not.
Why exclusivity follows from everything else
Set the previous articles beside this one and the exclusivity stops looking arbitrary. If the human problem were ignorance, many teachers could address it, and it would be strange to insist on one. If the problem were bad behaviour, many disciplines might improve it. But if the problem is guilt before a holy God and a nature dead in trespasses, then the only remedy is one that pays the penalty and imparts new life — and there is exactly one candidate who has done either, let alone both.
Christ is not the only way because Christianity says so. He is the only way because He is the only one who died for it.
Seen this way, the narrowness is not a restriction placed across an open field. It is the single door cut into a wall that had no door at all.
(KJV)
Narrow at the gate, and open to anyone
Christ Himself calls the way narrow, and does not apologise for it.
(KJV)
But narrowness of route must not be confused with narrowness of welcome, and the confusion is where most of the offence lives. There is one door — and no lineage qualifies you for it, no ethnicity excludes you from it, no record disqualifies you at it, and nothing is charged for passing through. God's own invitation, spoken through Isaiah, is addressed to the furthest edge of the map.
(KJV)
All the ends of the earth. The exclusivity is in the door, never in the guest list.
A hospital with one cure for a disease is not being narrow-minded. It is being accurate, and its accuracy is the patient's hope. To insist on other treatments in the name of open-mindedness would not be generous; it would be lethal.
The Altar
This doctrine is not finally a debating position. It is a matter of who you love, and how urgently. If there are many ways, then evangelism is a species of rudeness and the church may relax. If there is one, then the people around you are not adherents of alternative routes but travellers on no route at all, and your silence is not respect.
Hold the claim without hardness — it costs nothing to state gently what has cost God everything to provide. But do not hold it privately. Someone within your reach this week has never heard it put plainly by a person who believed it.
Scriptures cited
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All quotations are from the King James Version.