pluralism
For starters, I should lay out my beliefs on heaven/hell. I’m not a literal interpretation guy, I don’t think that there is actually a lake of fire that souls will burn in eternal conscious torment. I believe there is such thing as separation from God, but don’t necessarily think that the choice has to be made here. I think I’ll be spending quite a bit of time with some Hindus, Muslims, Jehovah’s Witnesses, members of many other religious in the life after death, and as Wright terms it “The life after life after death.”
Now that that’s out of the way… I’m not a pluralist either, at least not a religious pluralist. In fact, I’m downright against religious pluralism, at least in the sense that there are many ways to heaven. Let’s face it, the notion that any way is OK is a complete crock of contrived bull manure. I think there is only one way to heaven, or the New Earth after heaven (again if your an N.T. Wright fan), I think the whole “Way, Truth, and Life, No one comes to the Father but by Me” thing is true.
So to recap- I think that pretty much everyone gets to be in “Heaven” but I think the only way to “Heaven” is Jesus. (Please forgive my use of the quotes around Heaven, that whole issue is murky) So to repeat myself, I am not a religious pluralist.
Now, in case you missed it, a recent Pew Study shows that 70% of Americans (please note it says Americans here, not Evangelicals) believe that there are many paths to heaven (Religious Pluralism), and “57% of Evangelical Christians were willing to accept that theirs might not be the only path to salvation.”
This is actually bad news to me. In my opinion, we need to understand other religions, work with other religions, learn from other religions, but fully understand that Jesus is the only way to into “Heaven.” Some may say this is a good thing, and I hope they are saying it because it shows that Evangelicals and Americans in general are more accepting of other religions, but we need to understand that deeper than that acceptance is what appears to me as a weakening of our religious understandings.
I don’t want to come across as Fundamentalist or even Evangelical here, but I do what to emphatically state that we need to understand that if we believe the narrative of the Bible to be true, than Jesus is the only way of restoration, and that way is not narrow in the sense that not many people will be allowed through (as some Bible thumpers beleive) but is narrow in the sense that it is the only way.
Forgive me for the repetition, but I take this issue quite seriously, and I feel like it just shows another way that the church as we know it is failing to provide any sort of solid theology for the laeity to understand the gravity of “salvation theology.”
(HT: Blake Huggins)
email2friend