CORE Questions: Week 3
How can you say Jesus is the only way to God?
Explore the Question:
- Aren’t all religions just different expressions of the one real God?
- How is Christianity unique from other religions?
- If the life, crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus are the central to the Christian faith what historical evidence is there that they really happened?
- What about people who have never heard of Christ or who were born before Jesus lived? Are they eternally separated from God and going to hell?
Big Ideas:
- Everyone is making exclusive claims, even pluralists, because everything can’t be true.
For example, if someone says all religions are basically the same, then they are saying
Christianity is wrong, as is Islam, Judaism and even atheism, because each of these
belief systems is saying they know what is true, and therefore everything that
contradicts what they way must be false. - The way forward is to look at the claims of each religion, including atheism, agnosticism
and secularism, and the major world religions and ask: What do each of them teach?
Which best answers questions about?
o Origin: Where did we come from?
o Meaning: Why are we here?
o Morality: What is right and wrong and how do we discern that?
o Destiny: What happens after we die?
What does Christianity have to say about these questions?
o Origin: We were created by God in His image to be in eternal relationship with
Him.
o Meaning: We were made to love and worship God with all our heart, mind, soul
and strength. But we have rejected this relationship and chosen to worship
ourselves or other things. This has separated us from God and broken our
relationship with Him, other people and the world.
o Morality: God, as the creator and king, defines what is right and wrong. Humans
are made in His image and therefore have a universal leaning that there is such a
thing as moral rightness.
are made in His image and therefore have a universal leaning that there is such a
thing as moral rightness.
o Destiny: Humans have all fallen short of the moral life that we were created by
God to live and are therefore subject to judgement by our Creator. God came to
earth in the person of Jesus to live that perfect moral life and die on the cross to
take on the judgement of God. He then rose from the dead to prove all that
Jesus said and did was true, so death has been overcome and humanity has been
restored to eternal life with God.
- There is credible, historical evidence that Jesus lived, died on a cross and rose from
the dead. Christianity is based on historical events that that are recorded by
eyewitnesses who gave accounts of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus and many
of them later died for their testimonies about him. These accounts were recorded very
early in the first century and are supported by extra–biblical sources.
- What about people who are uninformed or misinformed about Jesus?
o According to the Bible, God does not judge people who have never heard of Christ
on the basis of whether they have placed their faith in Christ. Rather God judges
them on the basis of light of God’s general revelation in nature and conscience
that they do have. The offer of Romans 2:7 “to those who by patience in well–
doing seek for glory and honor and immortality, He will give eternal life” is a
bona fide offer of salvation. This is not to say that people can be saved apart
from Christ. Rather it is to say that the benefits of Christ’s atoning death could be
applied to people without their conscious knowledge of Christ. Such persons
would be similar to certain people mentioned in the Old Testament like Job and
Melchizedek, who had no conscious knowledge of Christ and were not even
members of the covenant family of Israel and yet clearly enjoyed a personal
relationship with God.—William Lane Craig.
(https://www.reasonablefaith.org/writings/popular–writings/christianity–other–
faiths/how–can–christ–be–the–only–way–to–god)