Interestingly I have received the question today in two different forms: what does it mean to say outside the church there is no salvation and what does it mean to say only through Jesus can we come to God? The answer is in how we use the name Jesus.
The Jesus of history is not an entity to whom we have access as we might to other individuals from the past. We have of him no sure biographical data except that he was crucified during the tenure of Pontius Pilate (and that some contest). We have a great deal of data about Jesus Christ or the Lord Jesus. Please note the name change. The church preaches “Lord Jesus”, “Jesus Christ”. We here are dealing not with a historical person, but a re-valued historical person, a person seen through the eyes of faith, a resurrected person, a person glorified by God, the “first born from among the dead”, a “life giving spirit for the sake of all”.
The historical Jesus is lost in the Christ. He is lost in his spiritual understanding of himself. He is lost in the confession of faith his first followers made regarding him. “Jesus Christ”, “Lord Jesus” is a divine overshadowing, a man in a state of being seized up into God and so being open to God’s use in and for the world. This state is the portal through which God acts in the world and through which we have access to God. It is the interface within which heaven and earth touch. It is the profound embrace of oneself as not fundamentally an ego but the very and true image of holy creativity. The historical Jesus is the initiator of this vision, this spirituality. His disciples are those who follow in his footsteps and likewise clothe themselves in this self-same understanding. That is why St. Paul is always preaching “to put on Christ Jesus”, to clothe oneself in Christ. That is why Paul speaks of one “dying to oneself” in being plunged into the waters of baptism and being “raised up into Christ Jesus”. The Christian becomes a partaker in this Christ-hood, a child of God, the divine revelatory presence in his/her time and place in history.
The Jesus of history does not say “I am the way, the truth, the life…”. It is Jesus Christ who says this. It is the man seized by, caught up in, possessed by God that says this. To be a Christian is to accent to that and share in that. Only by allowing oneself to be possessed by God is one in possession of God. The path to God or heaven is then in and only in this state, in being a Christian, a member of the community of Christians (the church), only in and through the life-giving spirit named Jesus Christ. It is in and through this presence, this understanding of self as intimately connected to the Holy, that one finds open the reality and power of the eternal.
Churches have done a very poor job of teaching people that the language of faith is not the everyday language of the street, not the language of science. The language of faith is a coded terminology, the imaginative poetics of spirituality. To not differentiate it from common parlance is a sacrilege. It offends against holiness and simultaneously closes the door to many who would enter into faith were it not handled so carelessly. The communion wafer is hailed the “Bread of Heaven” and the cup called the “Cup of Salvation”, and few would take literally that heaven has bread or that a sip of wine saves the soul of a man. But when it comes to words too many seem too ready to take them at surface value, and so the Word of God becomes a book, an idea, a doctrine rather than that which it truly is, a living person, a person filled with a spirit that is life-giving for the sake of all, a Christ, be that incarnate in a man two millennia ago or in you. Do not shy away from that idea. To be a Christian is no trivial matter; it is a radical re-evaluation of self, and in that a radical call to action. We worship that which we would be. That is the awesome power of religion.