Christian religion, on the other hand, may depict
Christianity as an ideological option among a plurality of
belief-options of equivalent veracity and validity, allowing
the individual to choose one option, or a combination of
several, or to inclusively incorporate all options as but
differing paths by which to approach the one god of the
universe. Both of these approaches, the fundamentalist that
seeks to establish an absolutist belief statement that
excludes all others, and the liberal that allows an inclusive
eclecticism that merges all thought into relativism,
mistakenly view the Christian gospel as an ideological
option. The issue that the Christian gospel confronts us
with is not a choice of an ideological option, but the choice
of life or death.
Allow me to illustrate in the form of an analogy,
admitting at the outset that the correspondences in all
analogies “break down” sooner or later. The reader will
soon detect that the details of this analogy have their
“breaking point.”
A certain man (isn’t that how Jesus started many of
His parabolic analogies?) made an appointment with his