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. 

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.

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

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

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.

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:

1. The Old Testament Scriptures expect a Messiah who is truly human and truly divine.
2. Jesus’s teachings and signs demonstrate that he is the fulfillment of that expectation.
3. 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.

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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.

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.

5. John Hick, Problems of Religious Pluralism (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985), 34.