I YAM WHAT I YAM.

I find myself sort of sidelined by the current direction the thread is going, and wanted to try to say how things look from my POV. Feel free to ignore.

I don't know about other Christians, or about other "branches" of Christianity, or about people who might claim to be Christians but really aren't, or vice versa. All of that is outside my ability to make categorical statements about.

I do know that I am taught that Jesus Christ is the only bridge between divinity and humanity. Being fully God and fully Man, he bridges the gap between the two realms and thereby makes it possible for us mere mortals to have concourse with God.

This doesn't mean I don't value people who are not Christians, or who don't believe this the way I do. I know many, many good and loving people -- and even some holy people -- who are on quite different paths from me. It is not my job to judge them, or their decisions, or their paths. I feel it is my job to do the best I can to be faithful to the path I find myself on.

I count pagans, atheists, agnostics, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Baha'is, etc. etc. among my friends.

And yet I belong to what you might call a very "exclusivist" branch of Christianity.

How can this be?

I don't know. Maybe I'm not a very good Orthodox Christian (as has been hinted here before). But I find myself in very good company, including some real luminaries of the Eastern Church like Fr. Alexander Men, who was martyred by the Soviets on the very eve of the downfall of their atheistic empire. He too refused to discount and reject others based on their religious choices, and was open to learning truth at any table he sat at, and yet he still proclaimed the gospel he was entrusted to teach.

Very often "conservative" Christians find themselves left out of a "tolerance" that tolerates everybody who tolerates everybody, but subtly refuses to tolerate people who make any kind of truth claims, or who say "This is true and its opposite is false." I cannot join in the great toleration game and say, "your way is just as true as my way." I can say, "My way may be false and yours true," because as a fallible human I might, in fact, have it all wrong. But if I'm right, then those creeds or paths which deny the things that are right, are wrong. Which leaves me out of the great toleration game.

Yet I do have a great love and respect for people on different paths, and don't look down on them as being of any less intellect, goodness, or even ultimately salvation, than myself. For as my one-time roommate once said, "you don't need to know the name of a bridge to cross it." And we are told in our own Scriptures that many will enter the kingdom of Heaven who didn't even know they were headed that way. Again, mine is not the judgment. Mine is only to keep my own nose clean, and try to practice the sort of faith and love that I've been called to.

This is where I am. Thanks for listening, if anybody did.

Alex