Just ran across the best thing I have ever read on the exclusivity of Christianity, by Richard Rohr in Simplicity: The Freedom of Letting Go (strung together from pp. 79-81):
I personally believe that Jesus represents most perfectly the heart and nature of God. But the Second Vatican Council says that Jesus is the light and the truth but that other religions also “reflect a ray of that Truth which enlightens all.” A “ray of Truth” had best be respected and received, and I would much sooner have that light than the darkness of arrogance and pride.
The absolutely crucial thing is to “go deep in one place” and let your God lead you to a place of surrender, love, and humility. Until then you do not understand or love your God anyway. The paradox is that when you make an “exclusive” commitment to “Jesus as your personal Lord and Savior” (to use the recent language of many groups), you are in fact committed to inclusivity! Because he was! That is the seeming contradiction that most fundamentalists never resolve.
I personally believe that we rather totally missed Jesus’ major point when we made a religion out of him instead of realizing he was giving us a message of simple humanity, vulnerability, and nonviolence that was necessary for the reform of all religions — and for the survival of humanity.
For some reason, we want the “person” of Jesus as our “God totem,” but we really do not want his message of “descent” except as a very functional message — this is what Jesus did to save us. We do not want it as a pattern of life and a path of our own liberation.
We need to be concerned with following Jesus, which he told us to do seventeen times, and less with worshiping Jesus — which he never once told us to do.
