47% of American Evangelicals agree with the statement: “God accepts the worship of all religions, including Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.”1 As unsettling as this statistic is, such ideas are really nothing new. Some six decades ago, the Roman Catholic Church declared in Vatican II’s Lumen Gentium that “those also can attain to salvation who through no fault of their own do not know the Gospel of Christ or His Church.”2 What’s even more troubling than the shift to religious inclusivism—in which Jesus is still recognized as the exclusive savior—is the cultural drift towards religious pluralism. According to religious pluralists, Jesus is not the exclusive Savior of the world but merely one choice among many other equally valid options. If religious inclusivism leveled the ground, pluralism has paved a wide road that leads to hell.
1. See “The State of Theology, 2025, statement 3.”
2. Second Vatican Council, “Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Lumen gentium, November 21, 1964,” in Vatican Council II: The Conciliar and Post Conciliar Documents, ed. Austin Flannery (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1975), sec. 16.
Seeing as the way to destruction is wide and easy (Matt. 7:13), the concern Paul conveyed to the Christians in Corinth is particularly potent for us today. Being aware of the threat that “philosophy and empty deceit” (Col. 2:8) pose to the Church, Paul warned that “as the serpent deceived Eve by his cunning, your thoughts will be led astray from a sincere and pure devotion to Christ” (2 Cor. 11:3). In a religiously pluralistic culture, it is essential for Christians to be able to defend the exclusivity of Christ for salvation, which is founded upon his uniqueness. In what follows, I’d like to herald the truth that establishes the exclusivity of Christ—the Incarnation—in order to show that pluralistic ideologies do not accord with God’s word.
Why the God-Man?
Why focus on the doctrine of the Incarnation in the face of religious pluralism? Simply put, underlying the shift towards pluralism is a defective answer to Jesus’s question: “Who do you say that I am?” An apt illustration of this point can be found in Hick’s book, The Metaphor of God Incarnate. Hick argues: “Within early Christianity Jesus was identified as God’s new anointed one of the royal house of David, who would in his second coming usher in the great Day of the Lord. However, as the second coming failed to occur, Jesus was gradually elevated within the Gentile church to a divine status.”3 Thus, according to Hick, the deity of Christ was a later development in the theology of the Church and was not a serious consideration for those who walked with Jesus during his earthly ministry.4
3. John Hick, The Metaphor of God Incarnate: Christology in a Pluralistic Age (Louisville: Westminster Press, 1993), 4–5.
4. It should be noted that, while John Hick is perhaps the most well-known religious pluralist, he is not representative of all strands of religious pluralism.
Hick’s motivation for such an assertion is far from neutral. If God has truly appeared in the flesh in the person of Jesus Christ, teaching things such as: “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6)—what case can be made for the possibility of salvation apart from faith in Jesus? Hick admits as much, as he rightly recognizes that the Incarnation, if true, “would seem to demand Christian exclusivism.”5 As a result, those committed to religious pluralism must reinterpret the Incarnation to fit within their pluralistic framework. In other words, for the pluralist, the Incarnation must mean something less than “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.”6
5. John Hick, Problems of Religious Pluralism (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985), 34.
6. What has resulted is a number of views that can be categorized as “degree Christologies.” In Hick’s words, degree Christologies “apply the term ‘incarnation’ to the activity of God’s Spirit or of God’s grace in human lives, so that the divine will is done on earth.” Hick, Problems, 35.
While pluralists such as Hick would like to retain the title of “Christian,” to deny the Incarnation is to rob Christianity of any and all soteriological, that is, salvific, relevance. If Jesus of Nazareth was just a man, he has no more ability to “save to the uttermost” (Heb. 7:25) than any other religious figure throughout history.7 This is because, as the Psalmist says, “truly no man can ransom another, or give to God the price of his life” (Ps. 49:7). As the great theologian Francis Turretin has succinctly put it: “our mediator ought to be God-man . . . man alone could die for men; God alone could vanquish death.”8 As such, the ontological uniqueness of Jesus as the God-man provides the basis for his soteriological exclusivity. In other words, it is because Jesus is truly God and truly man that he is uniquely qualified to be the exclusive Savior of the world.
7. Which, for the pluralist, is precisely the point.
8. Francis Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology, volume 2, trans. George Musgrave Giger, ed. James T. Dennison Jr. (Phillipsburg: P&R Publishing, 1994), 302.
A Three-Fold Defense of the Incarnation
Given the foundational importance of the Incarnation, I briefly want to present a three-fold defense from the biblical text that can be employed as Christians seek to confront the challenge of pluralism, specifically as it relates to the doctrine of the Incarnation. The defense can be easily recalled with these three words: Expectation, Fulfillment, Acceptance:
- The Old Testament Scriptures expect a Messiah who is truly human and truly divine.
- Jesus’s teachings and signs demonstrate that he is the fulfillment of that expectation.
- The eyewitnesses and earliest Christians accepted Jesus’s testimony as being the God-man.
Let’s consider each of these points in more detail.
1. The Old Testament Scriptures expect a Messiah who is truly human and truly divine.
The expectations concerning the Messiah appear as early as Genesis 3. In pronouncing the curse upon the serpent, the Lord declares: “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel” (Gen. 3:15). From this declaration on, the key question the Old Testament seeks to answer is this: Who is this promised offspring? He is the only one mentioned who can undo what Satan has wrought.
As the narrative unfolds, it is revealed that the promised child will come from the line of Judah (Gen. 49:10), and then the line of David.
While thus far it is clear that the promised Messiah would come as a man, we must also reckon with the attributes ascribed to him that, while not denying his humanity, point to him being more than just a man. Consider, for example, the prophet Isaiah. As Isaiah spoke of the future deliverance of God’s people, he prophesied about a child. This child would be conceived in the womb of a virgin (Isa. 7:14; cf. Matt. 1:23) and would be called “Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.” He would grow up to sit upon “the throne of David” to establish and uphold his kingdom “with justice and with righteousness from this time forth and forever” (Isa. 9:6–7). Not only is this child the promised seed of David, but he is given names that only rightfully belong to God. Ultimately, this promised child, while a man, would at the same time be Immanuel, “God with us”—exactly what God’s people need.
Although the examples could be multiplied (e.g., Isa. 40:3; Zech. 12:10; Ps. 110:1; Mic. 5:2; Dan. 7:13–14), the brief survey above is enough to make plain that the identity of the Messiah and the identity of Yahweh blend together. That is, the work accomplished by the Messiah is the work accomplished by the one, true God. While it is true that the prophets did not necessarily understand with absolute clarity that God would take on flesh, such expectations help us make sense of the witness Jesus provided, to which we will now turn.
2. Jesus’s teachings and signs demonstrate that he is the fulfillment of that expectation.
Jesus of Nazareth was born in Bethlehem (Matt. 2:1; cf. Mic. 5:2). He had a mother, brothers, a cousin. The humanity of Jesus is hard to escape as we read the New Testament. But as the New Testament witness makes clear, Jesus is not just a man. While space prohibits us from a fully fleshed-out defense of his deity, we can consider a few points.
One of the earliest characteristics of Jesus’s teaching ministry recorded in Mark’s Gospel is that he captivated audiences, “for he taught them as one who had authority, and not as the scribes” (Mark 1:22). From where is this authority? On multiple occasions, Jesus said things that would be considered blasphemous for any human to say. Consider the miracle of Jesus healing the paralytic in Mark 2. Some of the scribes who witnessed this miracle accused him of blasphemy, asking “who can forgive sins but God alone?” Immediately, Jesus gave a demonstration that he in fact can forgive sins, and he does so by having the formerly paralyzed man stand up to prove Jesus’s authority. Other statements from Jesus such as being Lord of the Sabbath (Matt. 12:8), one with the Father (John 10:30), the resurrection and the life (John 11:25), and I AM (John 8:58), make clear the basis of his authority—he is God in the flesh. As such, he alone has the authority to do the works of God.
Jesus’s witness concerning his identity extended beyond his teachings—time after time he performed signs that gave substantive proof that he did not speak on his own authority, but he only spoke what he was commanded by his Father (John 12:49). Of course, the greatest sign concerning the identity of Jesus is that of his death and resurrection (cf. Rom. 1:3–4). Jesus being hoisted upon a cursed tree and being laid into a borrowed tomb only to rise three days later with the keys to death in his hand is the ultimate testimony that he is both the eternal Word of God (cf. John 1:1) and the promised Davidic Son of Man.
In the time leading up to and immediately following his death and resurrection, Jesus repeatedly stated to his disciples that he must suffer, die, and be raised in order that the Scriptures be fulfilled (e.g., Matt. 26:54, 26:56; Mark 9:12; Luke 18:31–33, 22:37, 24:26–27, 24:44–46). How does this vindicate the reality of the Incarnation? As argued above, the Old Testament predicted that the Messiah, who is identified as Yahweh himself, would suffer, die, and rise from the dead to accomplish salvation for his people—Jesus unreservedly taught that his own suffering, death, and resurrection were necessary to fulfill that prediction. Because Jesus is the God-man, as demonstrated by his death and resurrection, he alone can stand in the gap between God and man, interceding for his people at the right hand of his Father on the basis of his own sufficient blood.
3. The eyewitnesses and earliest Christian communities accepted Jesus’s testimony as being the God-man.
The witness of the New Testament is abundantly clear that the eyewitnesses and earliest Christians accepted Jesus’s testimony that he was truly man and truly God on account of his resurrection from the dead. Following the resurrection, some believed; others doubted. Thomas, for example, refused to believe that Christ had truly risen unless he could see the marks the nails left upon his hands and feel his side which was pierced (John 20:25). In an act of great compassion, Jesus meets the demand by coming to Thomas, allowing him to see for himself. Upon feeling the wounds which marked the Lord, Thomas’s unbelief was undone as he cried out: “My Lord and my God!” (John 20:28). If Jesus were just a man, we would expect a scathing rebuke to Thomas. But no such rebuke comes. As the resurrected Messiah, Jesus accepts the worship given to him—and this would be blasphemy of the highest degree if he were not in fact God Incarnate.
In his writings, the Apostle Paul has no reservations in confirming both the manhood and deity of the Christ. For example, in his letter to the Christians in Rome Paul says the Gospel of God, which was promised by the prophets, concerned Jesus, “who was descended from David according to the flesh and was declared to be the Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by his resurrection from the dead” (Rom. 1:1–4). Elsewhere Paul explicitly calls Jesus both God (Titus 2:13) and man (1 Tim. 2:5). It is on the basis of Jesus’s existence as the God-man Paul would write things like: “For if, because of one man’s trespass, death reigned through that one man, much more will those who receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man Jesus Christ” (Rom. 5:17). Only God in the flesh could overturn the disastrous effects of the Fall.
The evidence that the earliest Christians accepted Jesus as the God-man is found beyond the pages of the New Testament. This is plain in the fact that the early Church was enveloped in all sorts of Christological heresies that denied either the true humanity (Docetism, Gnosticism) or the true deity (Arianism) of Christ. In response to such controversies, the Church articulated the New Testament witness concerning the identity of Jesus which led to formulations such as that of Chalcedon that affirm “our Lord Jesus Christ, at once complete in Godhead and complete in manhood, truly God and truly man.”9
9. For a more complete defense of the deity of Christ, see Robert M. Bowman and J. Ed. Komoszewski, The Incarnate Christ and His Critics (Grand Rapids: Kregel Academic, 2024).
Conclusion
Religious pluralism has paved a wide road to hell. To deny the Incarnation and subsequent exclusivity of Christ is to deny the Gospel which “is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes” (Rom. 1:16). Christians must hold fast to the confession that Jesus Christ is, in the most literal sense, God Incarnate. Through the expectations of the Old Testament, Jesus’s fulfillment of those expectations, and the acceptance of the earliest Christians, we may be confident that the eternal Word became flesh and dwelt among us. This truth, the truth of the Incarnation, not only provides the basis for the uniqueness of Jesus, but ultimately, his exclusivity as the Savior of the world. And it is on the basis of the Incarnation, we may boldly say: “There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12).
