I Don't Think Christ and Salvation are Particular to Christianity

     It was a Sunday morning like any other.  I got up at 6:00.  I pulled on pair of jeans and a warm flannel from the pile on the floor. I went to the gas station for a smoke and a diet Pepsi.  My wife was trying to get a few more minutes of sleep before the baby woke up.  You see, she is a worship leader at a small church in South Lyon, a half hour north of our home in Ann Arbor. Every Sunday she wows the congregation with her beautiful singing voice and the talent of the band she inherited when she started there a few weeks ago. I came home as my wife gently roused our little girl from her peaceful slumber by turning on her mobile that plays spring frogs and birds chirping.  Delia sleepily stirred to the little frogs and lions swirling lazily overhead.  After her morning meal, I changed her diaper and clothes and we all piled into the car.  I really love these Sunday mornings because we get to the church at 8:00, my wife goes to rehearse with the band, and Delia goes to play in the nursery.  This leaves me with two and a half hours of free time before the service to go write.  I head to the coffee shop a half mile down the road from the church.  I opened up the laptop to search for the answers to the swirl of troubling questions that have been on my mind the past few weeks.  Really they have been coagulating in my mind in pockets for the past few years.

     The primary question this day was, do people who follow other religions or no particular religion know God?  Are they saved?  I searched the online book stores for something that would address these questions, doing searches like "God in all religions, common"  Many of the books I came across were books written by Christians about how Christianity was the only path to God.  But a few stood out as different.  One book I came across was written not by a theologian, but a philosopher, called "Ultimate Truth: God Beyond religion."  I wondered if I was straying down a dark path contrary to Christianity.  Or was I walking out into the daylight?  I was troubled.

     At 10:30, the service started.  I stopped at the gas station for one more smoke and pop.  My wife called, mid-facebook-checking, to say that the service had started, our daughter was sitting with a complete stranger and she was going up to lead the opening worship.  I was not concerned.  The people at this little church have been nothing but welcoming and warm to my little family.  So many of them in that service have reached out and made a personal connection with my wife and me. We started going only a few weeks ago and already they are becoming family to us.  I quickly finished my brief interlude and headed back to the church to catch the end of the worship: Delia sitting in her stroller next to a wonderful woman I had met in the previous weeks. Delia was wide eyed and watching her beautiful mom sing about God and Jesus and all that they have done for us.

     Then the sermon started and this is where it gets interesting.  The female pastor I really like came up and this verse appeared on the overhead: "Jesus answered, 'I am the way, the truth and the life.  No one comes to the Father except through me.'"  My ears perked up.  Then she said something that made me love her even more.  She said that there were two ways to interpret this saying.  One way, the way I see so commonly in Christians, is basically that there is only one path to God and an eternal life in heaven by believing in Jesus.  But she said that there is an alternative interpretation.  It is basically that Jesus came into the world and died for all of us, everyone, so they could experience salvation.  This really got me thinking.  I know from experience that this Sunday morning coincidence of what was on my mind and what was in the sermon bore the fingerprints of God.  In Christianity it is called a divine appointment.

     Anyone can experience salvation. It is an idea that fits well into the theology I have built

up.  If you look at the context for this saying in John 14:6 by looking at the entirety of John 14 and 15, Jesus was comforting his disciples and reassuring them that following him will lead them to God and salvation.  He had just washed his disciples feet - setting the example of the servant.  Then he predicted his own death.  And his disciples gathered that the proverbial poop was about to hit the fan. The disciples are asking concerned questions. He says in response to Judas, "Anyone who loves me will obey my teaching. My Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them. Anyone who does not love me will not obey my teaching." If I put myself in the disciples' shoes, my next question would naturally be, what about people that don't even know you?  This question is not just conspicuously absent in the whole exchange, the silence is deafening.  And the ringing in my ears in the silence is the root of my hope for Christianity. Jesus never says that people that do not know him are doomed to eternal torment.  He doesn't even say that they can't know God.  The only thing I get from this exchange along those lines is if someone comes to know Jesus and does not love him, he will be estranged from God.  Duh.  Have you read Jesus's teaching?  What is not to love?  No matter what you believe, if you don't feel something positive for this man, your heart is in the wrong place. And if your heart rejects this Jesus, it would reject God.  Its all about your attitude. There are hordes of people in Islam, Eastern religions, even Judaism that revere Jesus and his teachings.  Many of these people love Jesus for who he was, and the posture of their heart is their salvation.  It is not by some rote prayer that every Christian must recite to enter into a eternity of bliss.  Salvation, as I have said before, was not meant by Jesus or anyone else in the New Testament, to be a magical ticket to an eternity in heaven.  It was the saving of one's heart, right here, right now. Because Jesus made it his singular purpose to bring God out of the quagmire of religion and make receiving Him a simple attitude of the heart.  He was consumed with bringing God to everyone, especially religious outsiders.  What about the Vine and The Branches in John 15?  I don't think Jesus was making some case against everybody that didn't believe as the disciples did.  He was telling the frightened doubting disciples to stay the course: they had found Jesus and he was telling them to hold on to that.

     The whole debate on who is going to heaven is utter nonsense.  Jesus and the New Testament was not concerned with "by and by, pie in the sky, going to heaven when you die."  It was concerned with the inclinations and attitude of the heart - the orientation of the core director our lives.  It was concerned with what are we putting first in our lives.  If we are putting God first, we are saved from our sinful nature.  How? Jesus showed us how: throw out religion and die to everything else but God.  That is salvation.  If you think this gets you into an eternity of bliss and that is why you don't buy anything I am saying, let me comfort you.  I firmly believe we will exist in some form for eternity and the state of our heart in our life here will continue into infinity.  I think this eternity is outside time and space (which by definition it is) so it is an instant of death and it is an infinity at the same time.  I believe that the state of your heart that you have developed by that time is the state of the heart you will carry into that moment.  But those are just musings and no one  knows what happens after death.  I think if someone did know, they couldn't put it into words.  Jesus is not concerned with this and I don't think we should be either.  The original "Christianity" was focused on the state of the heart right now, no matter what religious system you have sloppily adhered to your grey matter.  I believe salvation can come no matter what pinhole in man's intellectual religious landscape you have forced yourself into.  We are all square pegs in round holes when it comes to categorizing us.  I would assume our creator knows this if (even) we know this.
     I believe that salvation is the realignment of our hearts' inclinations toward God.  This comes through accepting the principles Jesus laid out.  Many people can come to this proper alignment to God without knowing the Jesus we know through the pages of scripture.  Otherwise, a very large portion of humans throughout history who loved God would be damned.  I don't think God engineered such a faulty policy. I think that it is important for the survival of Christianity and the spreading of the Gospel that we liberate Christianity from the exclusive club it sometimes is. I think Jesus would agree.