The Gospel in a Pluralist Society

Overview

What we see in the book of Acts is that the church was born in a pluralistic society — a society with many different beliefs in various gods. Christians made absolute truth claims about the one true God. Not surprisingly, this was not well-received at times (it got the first apostles thrown into jail). There was real opposition in a pluralistic society to these absolute truth claims.

Christians today are increasingly told we need to get with the times in our modern pluralistic society. We’re told we shouldn’t be making universal claims and that Jesus is the only way to be saved. But Christians have faced the same kind of opposition in the past. Let’s see what we learn from the earliest church under these three headings: the problem with truth claims, the problem with the problem with truth claims, and the solution to the problem.