The Only Way?

Marcus Borg in his new book, The God We Never Knew, spends some time discussing the problems that the modern progressive Christian has with what Borg terms “dogmatic religion.” A couple of these questions piqued my interest: the divinity of Christ and the exclusivity of the Christian faith. The presence of exclusivity is a result of the question often asked of Christians, “how about all those people in Africa and Asia that have never heard of Jesus, are they condemned to hell? That doesn’t seem fair, does it?” I must admit that I have had a hard time with this question most of my life. To be totally honest, I don’t think that I have answered that question to my own satisfaction, much less the satisfaction of others. Dealing with omniscient fairness makes me uncomfortable. I don’t know how to define fair as it applies to God. Is it fair that I live in a country where we are well fed and people are suffering from hunger? Is it fair that I have access to health care that can cure diseases that kill thousands of people a year? Is it fair that I can listen to Beethoven when the deaf can’t? Is it fair that I can see the beauty of the sunset and the blind can’t? I don’t know. I only know that I should be thankful that I was born who I am, where I am, and how I am. But those are small things when compared with eternal damnation–or separation from God. If you have never had the chance to convert to Christianity, how can you be punished? Of course, Paul answers this in Romans by saying “for what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. Ever since the creation of the world his eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made. So they are without excuse” (Romans 1: 19-20, New Revised Standard Version). Coupled with the statement of Jesus in John 14:6 that “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (NRSV), one would think that the question was answered. Of course, the answer seems harsh and unfair and as Borg says “impossible to reconcile with the grace of God” (Borg 25). So, Borg like so many of the progressive theologians sidesteps the problem by believing that the Bible is not divine. Rather, the Bible is “a cultural product” (24) and therefore has limited relevance to an enlightened person living in an enlightened age. This allows Borg to create a universe in which God is loving, full of grace, and ready to include all religions and men into his kingdom. These kind of thinkers can dismiss whole sections and teachings from the Bible as irrelevant and participate in some kind of progressive Christianity in which everyone is somehow included in everything. There are no problems with sin, creation, evil, or justice — everything is looked at from a love-infused haze of inclusivity. “Come all,” they say, “just don’t repeat the parts of the Nicene Creed in which you don’t believe.” There are no Biblical standards, no commandments, no right, no wrong — just come together and kneel before God. The question remains why? Why should I kneel before the God of grace, when no matter what I do, I am included? In reality, this slippery slope of Biblical irrelevancy has produced the atmosphere in which large numbers of people have stopped believing in God or believe in some nebulous wishy-washy idea of the “man upstairs.” The church, at least the mainline Protestant churches, are afraid of Jonathan Edwards’ “angry God,” to such an extent that those who believe in Him, the Bible, and traditional Christianity are perceived by them as ignorant fundamentalists who have hidden themselves from the modern world and retreated into some cocoon-like protection form their self-perceived truth.
The answer to exclusivity inside a traditional view of the Bible and Christianity is one of eternal responsibility. If Christ is the only way, then each Christian is given the responsibility to do all they can to insure that everyone hears the truth before they die. There is no other way — no transfer of this responsibility to the thousands of other creed and belief systems. There is no comfort zone where we as members of the “progressive culture” can abdicate that responsibility to the other faiths. By viewing the Bible as a “cultural document,” Borg has enabled a whole generation of “Christians” to worry about themselves and truly become members of the “me generation.”