A friend of mine recently blogged and said:  Sometimes it is hard to be Presbyterian….  With a church who has pastors who don’t hold to the Truth of the Word… I would be sad as well.

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This is a copy of his blog posting:

The AP news just published the results of a new poll (pdf) conducted by the PCUSA saying  that one in three members of the nation’s largest Presbyterian denomination believe that Jesus Christ is not the only way to get into heaven. (AP)

To learn where this belief comes from, you need only look at their pastors. Their numbers are even lower. Only 35 percent of surveyed pastors agreed with the statement that “only followers of Jesus Christ can be saved.” So, almost two-thirds of the pastors in the largest Presbyterian denomination in the United States seem to believe that there are ways to heaven apart from  Jesus Christ.

These numbers have been the same in PCUSA internal polling since 1996, so they have reflected the Presbyterian (USA) experience for awhile. On July 29, 2000, the Rev. Dirk Ficca, keynote speaker at a Presbyterian Church (USA) peacemaking conference, declared that much of the discord that fractures humanity is fomented by groups that hold exclusive religious convictions. His solution was to declare an equivalency among many faiths.

“If God is at work in our lives, whether we’re Christian or not, what’s the big deal about Jesus?” Rev. Dirk Ficca

The Presbyterian Layman reported that, after a lengthy debate, the best the 2001 General Assembly, the denomination’s highest governing body, could say about the exclusivity of Jesus Christ was that He was “unique.”

Other recent PCUSA internal polling data has shown that, among members, only 43 percent disagree or strongly disagree that “all the world’s religions are equally good ways of helping a person find ultimate truth.” The majority of members (60 percent), elders (68 percent), and pastors (66 percent) at least agree that “the only absolute truth for humankind is in Jesus Christ.”

Forty-six percent of members and 61 percent of pastors say the Bible is the word of God, to be interpreted in the light of its historical and cultural context. Around one in three lay people and pastors say the Bible is the word of God, to be interpreted in the light of its historical context and Church teachings.

At this point it would be really easy to jump all over the Presbyterians, but the truth is that these beliefs are common in many Christian denominations. In fact, a different survey taken last year by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life found that 57 percent of evangelical Christians in the U.S. believe that “many religions can lead to eternal life.”

How far have we gotten from the basics of the Christian faith? In John 14:6, Jesus told us the following….

“I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”

There is no other way to salvation. Just think about it for a minute. If there was any other way for our sins to be forgiven, then why did Jesus need to die on the cross? Jesus could have simply come down to earth, pointed out a bunch of other ways to get to heaven, and then could have gone back up to heaven without ever having to deal with the cross.

The truth is that there was no other way for our sins to be paid for…(Solus Christus) Jesus Christ is our only Savior, who mediates the rupture our rebellion (sin) has placed within us, between us, and which has separated us from God. Through his life, death, and resurrection, God reveals divine love to us and upholds divine justice for us, removing our guilt, and saving us from spiritual death. Christ’s mediation frees us to be reconciled to God, to each other, and within ourselves.  All other religions reject this, and most of them involve jumping through “hoops” and doing good works of some kind or another in order to try to obtain the favor of a deity. But, the reality is this, without the sacrifice of Jesus Christ there is no way into heaven. Without Jesus to pay for our sins we are all still guilty. The truth is that the church in America is struggling.

2 Timothy 4:3 tells us this…..for the time will come when men will not put up with sound doctrine, instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear.

Thankfully, traditional Christian beliefs are still around.