CHRISTIANITY; THE ONLY WAY?

This expression remains one of the commonest and most used clichés in modern day christianity. For us Christians, it is believed that without accepting Christ Jesus as our Lord and personal saviour, one would be damned for hell and suffer eternal damnation.

This idea has often been knocked into our heads like burning data into a DVD that we Christians now feel like the lucky few while those ‘outside the shed’ are all Hades bound on a first class flight ticket.

The question then is this; what if the first contact of Christians in the Southern part of Nigeria was with Persians or Turkish merchants. What if the Chinese monks had taken it upon themselves to spread the Budha and Tai Chi far and wide across West Africa and had settled in Opobo, around the River Niger or Lagos? Most certainly we would have been made to imbibe their religion and much of their 'Eastern' as against Western culture. Thus we would have been Muslims or Buddhists. Sunday services would have been Jummats in the mosques and visits to the Temples. The likelihood is that we would have adopted Arabic or Mandarin/Chinese as our major language, eat with chop sticks rather than spoons, drink herbal tea in place of hot choc and probably adopt martial arts training as part of our normal life

The truth is that most of us-the Christ oriented elements follow Jesus Christ today because we were BORN into it, not because we CHOSE to be. For those amongst us who chose Christianity later in their lives, chances are that they did so because of the inner conviction or persuasion they had of/by another Christian who was born into it. So in the end, it all arises from what we find around us and hardly down to our making. For those who claim to have been "called by God"....hmmm, I could also switch to Islam and CLAIM to have been called by Allah, the most merciful.

The simple conclusion to all this is that if we had been colonised by any other group of persons with other religious inclinations but Christianity, we would have been anything but Christians. We would not have had the Conviction that 'Christ is the only way'. It follows therefore that we would have been on a ‘wrong way’ (possible on no way at all because there is Only one way-Jesus Christ). Would we all have been on the side of those doomed for hell because surely we wouldn't have taken to Christianity?

The Holy Bible, the most revered book ever states in the book of Acts 10:34-35 that;

34: "....now I understand that God is not partial,(35)but in EVERY nation, the man who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him" (emphasis mine).

 Need I say more?

#A peek into the Diary of a Recluse….

Onyeka Ehiwuogwu