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For the pluralists, the Shema of the Jews, the Christian Creeds, the Muslim Shahada (There is no God but Allah and Mohammed is his prophet,) and the Buddhist belief that at the heart of reality there is the emptiness of Nirvana, all have their own saving power.

In an October 18, 2006, interview broadcast on NPR's "Here and Now," Episcopal Church Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori stated, "Christians understand that Jesus is the route to God. That is not to say that Muslims, or Sikhs, or Jains, come to God in a radically different way. They come to God through human experience—through human experience of the divine."

Jesus Christ is the way and the truth and life for us, Canadian Anglican Bishop Michael Ingham argued in his 1997 book Mansions of the Spirit, but there are other "diverse paths to God." The Bible stands as an account of "emerging God-consciousness," he argued, but our knowledge of God is not solely confined to Scripture, as there is "a yet wider view of God's self-disclosure" through human mystical experiences.

"We who practice the Christian tradition understand him as our vehicle to the divine," Jefferts Schori told Time magazine in its July 10, 2006, issue. "But for us to assume that God could not act in other ways is, I think, to put God in an awfully small box."

Protestant and Catholic Church leaders have largely rejected these views, from the Council of Florence's 1438 declaration that there was "no salvation outside the church" to the 1974 Lausanne Declaration by evangelicals that there was "no salvation outside a personal and explicit confession of faith in Jesus Christ."

Anglican theologian J. I. Packer defended the exclusive role of Jesus in his 1994 book, Jesus Christ the Only Savior, while Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the current Pope Benedict XVI, in 1996 called this interreligious relativism "the fundamental problem of faith in our time."

In 2000, the Roman Catholic Church clarified its position in Dominus Iesus, which stated "the thesis that the revelation of Jesus Christ is of a limited, incomplete, and imperfect character, and must be completed by the revelation present in other religions, is contrary to the faith of the Church. … This position radically contradicts the affirmations of faith according to which the full and complete revelation of the salvific mystery of God is given in Jesus Christ."

"If Billy Graham or Pope Benedict" were asked the questions Episcopal leader Jefferts Schori were asked, they would respond that "Jesus is the Way, the Truth and Life," Harmon said. In a time of doctrinal confusion, "good leadership claims its particular identity from the stability of its historical faith," he argued.

"It's the leadership of this church giving up the unique claims of Christianity," Harmon said. "They act like it's Baskin-Robbins. You just choose a different flavor and everyone gets in the store."

The question of multiple paths leading to the divine has also been a professional question for some Episcopal clergy.

At the Episcopal Church's 2000 General Convention—the triennial meeting of its governing body—a booklet entitled Resources for Jubilee was distributed to deputies; it carried an endorsement from the convention's secretary that it could serve as a "possible source of ideas to carry with you." Enclosed in the booklet was the Summer 2000 issue of Spirituality and Health with articles promoting "witchcamps," the Wiccan "Pentacle of Iron," and a "shamanic journey into the underworld and back again" taken by an Episcopal priest with the guidance of a "raccoon spirit."

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March (Web-only) 2009, Vol. 53