In the business world, a monopoly is frowned upon and even legislated out of being such. A monopoly (from Greek monos) is defined as a persistent market situation where there is only one provider of a product or service, in other words a firm that has no competitors in its industry. Christianity (can you say the Roman Catholic church?)thought that it had a monopoly on SALVATION for hundred of years. Then along came Islam, Enlightenment, Reformation, modern science, and pluralism. And before you know it, there’s not only competition in the field of “a salvistic patent“, but there’s evidence there never was a monopoly at all anyway.

Why would God limit Himself just to one group of people?

What’s fair about that?

Pope Pius IX (1792 – 1878), got the ball rolling saying in effect, “Invincible ignorance among Christians is no sin”. In other words, there may be hope for those outside the Mother church. Maybe there wasn’t an inalienable salvistic right given to Catholicism in the first place: there sure wasn’t one given to the Protestants.

And over the course of the last 200 years particularly, a tide of mercy, tolerance, and realism has slowly hit the beaches of various denominational door steps. Surely God didn’t create a plan wherein only one denomination, one religion was to convert ALL the world to it’s way of thinking. Western Christians think differently than Eastern Christians. Buddhists think differently than Muslims, who have a different approach than Hindus……and on and on.

One of my favorite theologians (Hugh Montefiore), who is no longer with us, summed it up for me with this statement in 1993. “It remains true of course that salvation is found within the church- that is the abiding truth within the doctrine- but it is not true that outside the church there is no salvation. If it were true, we could hardly continue to believe in a God of love.”

But since HIS IS…THERE IS!