Click here to read Part I... Those who claim that ‘Christ is only one way to God’ are so far off the mark that they do not really know what they are saying. The love that God has for us is one of giving. The Father gives everything He is to the Son; the Son gives Himself back to the Father and gives Himself to us. In doing so He offers us up to the Father - and the love we give to Christ is given by Him back to the Father. But the person offering the love cannot be imbued with an ineffable sense of the divine unless he or she recognises His becoming man and dying for us on the cross. 

 

Therefore it goes without saying that this can only happen to individuals who love Christ - and individuals can only love Christ if they take on His dying for us. Your love for God must be one that both needs Him and appreciates Him, not one that just appreciates His being. Christ said that He is the only way to the Father and it is for this reason. Our imitation of God in this life - I mean the one that is distinct from any likeness which He has impressed upon the world - must be an imitation of God incarnate; not just of the cross, but of His teaching methods and His pure will to obey the Father. This is what we mean when we say that the divine is fully operational in each of us who is able to appreciate our God living under human conditions. He humbled Himself and became man and that is the image in which Christ confers upon us every opportunity to share in the divine love. 

 

But there is an interesting paradox - on the one hand we were born to share in this - it has been in our hearts from the very beginning - but on the other hand we are creatures who seek justice, therefore any claim that Christianity is the one and only true religion must occasionally invoke in us some feelings of resistance. In this modern world of democratic feeling, utilitarianism, and political and individual correctness, claims of exclusiveness do not always sit well with us, and I think that this naturally causes the resistance.

 

He wants us to grow with Him. It is not very easy to understand His love if we have to resort to comparing it to human love. His love is one that wants to give us gifts for our betterment. He has no wish for reciprocity in the human sense. God created us, not out of necessity, but out of grace - this is not abrasive scholastic conjecture, it is absolutely necessary if we are to fully understand His love and grace. 

 

I firmly believe that all He has made thus far is merely a drop in the ocean compared with what is to be made in the future. Perhaps the analogy of an ocean is misleading, for I do not think that we can really think of size when we think abut what is to come - it will be something transcendent of time and shape. But at the moment, He is gradually perfecting His creatures, first into loving Him, and secondly, into being more like His Son. God already foresaw, or perhaps more accurately ‘forefelt’ every bit of pain that Christ endured even before creating us. That is the true blueprint of what love is - no other religion comes close; no earthly way of life is in the same stratosphere. 

 

I think the pantheistic religions have got it wrong. God created things that were not part of Himself, so that they could learn to love Him at the same time as drawing closer to that which is presently distinct from Him. The divine love is begotten though the Son so that God can create for us a real pleasure in the distinction between creature and Creator. The love can be reciprocated in a way that transcends anything pantheistic. Even before the world was created, God had humbled Himself with a plan, so that man could know Him though Christ. From the very beginning of creation, we were made to relinquish and to surrender; but we were made in a way that our surrender would be, not only a pleasure, but an epiphany - a revelation - a pathway to paradise. By relinquishing and surrendering we become more ourselves, we become more like God. We cannot escape them anywhere we look. 

 

No other religion can possibly reveal to us anything comparable to that which shows us God in human flesh. All other religions deny this, and in the process each adherent denies himself any real knowledge of God. They do not even exist for the sake of grace or love; for grace Himself and love Himself created us so that He could love us and show us grace. Denial of this leaves us with nothing more than a polysyllabic variant of atheism. To deny this is to deny God. 

 

Judaism, Islam and most of the cults believe that no man has seen God. The pantheistic religions believe that God is all. Both miss the point. The whole point of creation is that He was not content to be unreachable - He wants to be reached through His Son. And equally, He does not want to be all - He wants to be a part of all; that is, He wants a relationship which will bring about the gradual perfecting of your soul. And with a little thought, it is much more being in all than it is just being all. It is just that when you take away the precept of ‘God as a man’ away from your religion, you are left with little more than a microcosmic development of atheism. 

 

To not recognise God as a man is to not recognise the big picture of God at all. In the incarnation, God the Son takes the body and human soul of Christ, and, through that, the whole environment of nature, the entire creaturely predicament, into His own being. Therefore restriction, locality, hesitancy, frustration, agony and death are known by God from within. The glorious divine light walks the earth and the darkness of humanity is received into the heart of God. And that is why it is only possible to know the Father through Christ (John 14:6).

Christianity is not all rosy - nothing can be really. But even those moments when the Christian faith does not seem so rosy are for our own betterment. Even those times when I wish it were not true, those times I want to get away from everything that reminds me of Him - they are the times which remind me how real it all is. 

 

If I never become disillusioned, then I should suspect that all the other times I delight in it were simply wish-fulfilments. That, by the way, explains the feebleness of all those diluted versions of Christianity (Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, to name but two) which expunge all the dark introspective elements and try to establish a religion of pure and unadulterated comfort and relief. No real belief in the diluted versions can achieve anything more than an illusory existence. Spellbound as we are, we know that objective reality consists, not of things which are always agreeable, but of undulating levels of agreeableness and sinuous twists and turns, leading us as much into dark alleys as sunny valleys. 

 

It is the very nature of the real that it should have moments when everything that is held dear to us seems as fragile as a glass roof. We are at our best when we ‘cleave ever to the sunnier side of doubt’ - not when we obstinately presume that everything we have been told must be right because of trans-generational conveyance by family elders. God created things that were not part of Himself, so that they could learn to love Him at the same time as drawing closer that which is presently distinct from Him.

 

That is not to say that all those who follow other religions are completely without hope. I believe that God’s grace will extend a lot further than we can imagine. We are told that He can sympathise with us at every moment. If you are stuck in a country where your religion has been indoctrinated; installed into you by oppression - or if bad influences have, thus far, been too powerful for you to resist, you can be sure that He knows about it. He is quite aware of how hard it has been for you. He knows that your earthly desires have been strangled by external influences which bring about a reality that is, in those quiet times, contrary to that which really should have been yours from the beginning. He knows that the hunger which He set in your heart has been stifled by the Bad One. He knows the real flexibility of those beliefs which have been installed by those who never saw fit to question their faith. 

 

In believing that God is unreachable, man is stimulating only part of his true earthly desire. He has, all along, wanted to be like God - for that is what Christ is offering, that through Him we can (eventually) be like God. In rejecting this, man has taken a part of what Christ is offering and tried to expedite the process; that is, he has made himself a god of his own life on earth by following his own path. But this can only lead to despair.