Exclusivity of Christ

Claim: Christians are intolerant and/or exclusive.

Today, you hear this idea everywhere. Media figures such as Oprah Winfrey have stated,

“One of the mistakes that human beings make is that ‘there is only one way to live’…[but there are] many paths to what you call[ed] ‘God’.”

Philosophically though, this is a pretty big problem. ‘Exclusivity’ is just the nature of the Truth.

If you come up to my brother and his wife and asked “Is she pregnant” and one said “yes” while the other said “no”, you wouldn’t say “Ok thanks”. It’s common sense to see a contradiction.

As a whole, all worldviews contradict each other. Christianity says one thing about God, Islam another, atheism another, and so forth. You can’t have all of these worldviews be essentially right. They don’t agree. In fact, if everyone was all-inclusive, you wouldn’t need multiple worldviews. On top of that, you wouldn’t have people splitting off from one worldview to another, seeing as it wouldn’t be a “fundamental” reason.

Let me put it another way: Take Christianity. In Christianity, you have Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox. Now these beliefs are fundamentally the same, but superficially different. They all agree on the main things. This is why they’re all a part of the same worldview-Christianity. However, when you have another belief that says “there is no God,” they can’t be essentially the same. That’s why they’re listed under another worldview.

The truth of the matter is, every worldview is exclusively intolerant.

~ by johnfoxe on May 24, 2008.