No Other Branch

Two Banks on One Street

Here is a scene I am making up, though you may know someone it has happened to.

A man is in a hurry, which is the condition under which most bad decisions get made. He has a cheque to cash before the end of the working day. Two banks face each other across a busy road, and he walks into the nearer one. The signboard has the right colours. The cashier smiles. The queue feels familiar, and somewhere at the back a generator is humming the way generators do. He hands over his cheque and waits a long while. Then the cashier looks at it kindly and says, “Sir, this isn’t our account. The bank you want is across the road.”

He crosses. He is embarrassed and fifteen minutes poorer, and then he is paid, and he goes home.

That is where the comparison stops working. A wrong bank costs an afternoon. If Jesus was telling the truth about himself, a wrong god costs a great deal more, and the New Testament speaks as though this life is where the question gets answered (Hebrews 9:27). Nobody is promised a second window across the road.

I want to argue that when Jesus claimed to be the only way to the Father, he was saying the most serious thing anyone has ever said to our neighbours, and that it was never meant as an insult. But the objection deserves a fair hearing first, because it is held by decent people and it has a lot going for it.

Why Pluralism Is So Easy to Love

The best version of religious pluralism goes something like this. Nobody has seen the whole of God. Every tradition holds a piece of the truth, shaped by the soil it grew in. To insist that your piece is the whole thing is arrogance, and arrogance has filled graveyards. Better to hold your own faith warmly, honour everyone else’s, and let God sort out the rest.

A pluralist would accept that as a fair statement of the view, and I don’t think it is a stupid one. In Nigeria it is hardly even an abstraction. By Pew’s estimate, about 56 percent of Nigerians were Muslim and about 43 percent Christian in 2020, and Nigeria is the only country in the world that sits in the top ten for both populations (Hackett, 2025). Those aren’t two camps on opposite sides of a river. They are cousins on the same family WhatsApp group, and they are neighbours who share a gate. Pew also counted Nigeria among seven countries with very high social hostilities involving religion as of 2022 (Hackett, 2025). When people have buried their own because of a religious riot, “all roads lead to the same place” sounds less like a theory and more like a prayer for peace.

The idea has spread well beyond Nigeria, and well into the church. When Pew asked Americans in 2007, 70 percent of those who belonged to a faith said that many religions can lead to eternal life. Even among evangelical Protestants the figure was 57 percent (Pew Research Center, 2008). Believers in Jesus are saying it about their own faith.

So what is wrong with it? Two things, I think. The first is that the elephant picture, where each tradition feels one part of the animal, quietly assumes that the person telling the story can see the whole elephant. That is a very large claim to make from the sidelines, and it is far more exclusive than it looks. The second is that tolerance has never required agreement. You can believe your neighbour is mistaken about God and still defend his right to worship, his shop, and his life. Jesus told Peter to put his sword away (John 18:11), and the church has never been more faithful to him than when it has remembered that.

What Jesus Said to Thomas

Jesus did not volunteer his most famous sentence to a crowd. He said it to a frightened friend. He had just told the disciples he was going away to prepare a place for them, and Thomas, who has a reputation for honesty, said they had no idea where he was going, so how could they know the way (John 14:5). This is the answer he got.

“I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”

— John 14:6 (ESV)

Notice what he did not do. He didn’t hand Thomas a map. He didn’t say he knew a very good route. The way, in that sentence, is a person, and the person is the one speaking.

C. S. Lewis saw that this leaves very little room for the comfortable option. In Mere Christianity (Book II, chapter 3) he argued that a mere man who said the things Jesus said could not be a great moral teacher. He would be a madman, or in Lewis’s phrase “the Devil of Hell”, and nothing in between (Lewis, 1952). Philosophers still argue about whether those are the only choices, and Lewis is not the last word. But he put his finger on something real. You can’t keep the kindness of Jesus and quietly drop the part where he says who he is. Take that part out and what’s left is a different religion.

Peter took the same line when it cost him something. He had denied knowing Jesus three times in a courtyard (Luke 22:54 to 62). Not long afterwards he stood before the same ruling council that had handed Jesus over, and said this.

“And there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved.”

— Acts 4:12 (ESV)

That is not the voice of a man enjoying his own cleverness. It is a man on trial, saying the thing most likely to get him killed.

I should be careful about what the verse does and doesn’t settle. Christians have argued for centuries about what God does with people who never heard the name, and I am not going to settle that in a paragraph. What the New Testament never does is offer anyone a second name to put beside Jesus.

When the Shrine Is Not a Metaphor

Some readers will feel all of this as a debate in a lecture hall. Many Nigerian readers won’t.

Anyone who has sat through a family meeting after a death knows how the conversation goes. Somebody says in a low voice that an uncle consulted a diviner before a big decision, and the room goes quiet while everyone does the arithmetic. Certain objects sit in certain corners of certain houses for reasons nobody will fully explain. And most of us have heard a deliverance minister list the sources of a family’s trouble with a confidence that didn’t come from theology alone.

The numbers agree with the living rooms. In a report published in November 2025, Pew said about seven in ten adults in Nigeria believe that spells, curses or other magic can influence people’s lives (Hackett, 2025). The Kenyan scholar John Mbiti wrote as long ago as 1969 that “in traditional society there are no irreligious people” (Mbiti, 1969, as quoted in Dictionary of African Christian Biography, n.d.). Nobody is going to talk a Nigerian reader out of the spiritual world by calling it superstition. Missionaries who tried that mostly discovered that their converts kept visiting grandmother’s diviner at night, because the daytime sermon had no answer for the funeral.

And grandmother was not stupid. She went because she was afraid for her children and nobody else had offered her anything. That should make us gentle. It shouldn’t make us silent.

Paul wrote to a church in a city full of temples, and he did not call the temples empty.

“No, I imply that what pagans sacrifice they offer to demons and not to God. I do not want you to be participants with demons.”

— 1 Corinthians 10:20 (ESV)

His point is that something is there. The mistake is in the identity of what is there. Power and truth are different things, and Scripture keeps them apart from Genesis to Revelation. Pharaoh’s magicians could turn water to blood and bring up frogs, which is where Moses must have felt rather outnumbered (Exodus 7:22; 8:7). Then Aaron struck the dust and the gnats came, and the magicians tried and could not, and said to Pharaoh that this was the finger of God (Exodus 8:18 to 19). They could produce signs. They could not undo what God was doing. Power at the wrong address doesn’t turn into salvation. It turns into evidence.

Elijah on Mount Carmel at Noon

There is a scene in 1 Kings 18 that the church ought to read more often, and not only for the theology.

Israel had been limping, in Elijah’s word, between two opinions. The king had married into the worship of Baal, a drought had gone on for years, and Elijah summoned 450 prophets of Baal to Mount Carmel with a crowd of undecided people watching (1 Kings 18:19 to 21). The terms were simple. Each side would prepare a bull and put no fire under it. The God who answered with fire was the real one.

The prophets of Baal went first. They called on him from morning until noon. They danced round the altar. Nothing happened. Then Elijah, who had waited long enough, joined in.

“And at noon Elijah mocked them, saying, “Cry aloud, for he is a god. Either he is musing, or he is relieving himself, or he is on a journey, or perhaps he is asleep and must be awakened.””

— 1 Kings 18:27 (ESV)

You can hear the crowd shifting on its feet. This is sarcasm, and it is accurate sarcasm. A god who needs volume, repeated reminders and the right atmosphere has failed the first requirement of being a god. His target was an arrangement that depended on how loudly people could cry, and the people were secondary. The prophets answered by cutting themselves until they bled, and kept it up through the afternoon, and the text records that there was no voice, no answer, and no attention (1 Kings 18:26 to 29).

Then Elijah rebuilt a broken altar with twelve stones. He had water poured over the offering three times, until the trench around it was full, which in a drought is a deliberate extravagance. He prayed a short prayer. There was no dancing and no cutting.

“Then the fire of the LORD fell and consumed the burnt offering and the wood and the stones and the dust, and licked up the water that was in the trench.”

— 1 Kings 18:38 (ESV)

Elijah had not been louder, or more devout in his performance, or better prepared. He was at the right address, and the God at that address was there. What was or wasn’t behind Baal’s altar I will leave to the apostle Paul. On Carmel, nothing answered.

The God Who Crossed the Street

Everything I have said so far is diagnosis. If that were the whole of it, the gospel would be a stern signboard that says you are standing in the wrong queue, good luck. That would be accurate, and it would be cruel.

The bank story needs one more turn. The man in the scene had to find the right branch for himself. He had to read the signs, ask the question and cross the road, and he was a competent adult who could do all of that. The people we love are not in that position. Most religious systems, including some very noble ones, describe a road a person must climb, and I won’t flatten the many ways other faiths speak of mercy. But the Christian claim is peculiar in what it says about who does the crossing. God did, in person. He became flesh and walked into the mess, died on a Roman cross, and rose on the third day in a body, in history, in front of witnesses. If the bank is the right bank, the manager came out and took the cheque himself.

That is why the resurrection carries so much weight. N. T. Wright has argued as a historian that the empty tomb and the appearances together are best explained by the claim that Jesus was raised, and that the shape the early Christian movement took makes little sense without it (Wright, 2003). Reviewers have noted that he spends more of his energy on how historians should approach the question than on answering each sceptical theory in turn (Neff, 2003). So his case is best read next to the writers who take the sceptics on one by one. But the resurrection is the receipt. It is the thing that tells you the account is open.

“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.”

— John 3:16 (ESV)

Whoever believes. The verse doesn’t say whoever has been devout enough, or was raised in the right family, or performs the ritual with enough consistency. It says whoever believes, and it says the Father gave the Son first.

Augustine spent years running to every address the late Roman world offered. He tried the Manichaeans, then philosophy, then ambition and the polish of a good career, before he arrived at the God he had been circling the whole time. He begins his Confessions by saying that God made us for himself and that our hearts are restless until they rest in him (Augustine, 1991, Book 1, chapter 1). I read that restlessness as a sign that the transaction hasn’t been completed. It is also a mercy, the same one the cashier shows when she looks up kindly and says the account you want is across the road.

Walking Across

If you are reading this from inside a family that has both banks on one street, here is something small and specific to try.

Don’t begin with the argument. Open John 14 and read it in one sitting, from the beginning, until you get to Thomas. Thomas asked the question you are probably asking, and he asked it out loud in front of the others, and nobody laughed at him. Jesus did not scold him for asking, and he didn’t hand him a map. Read what he says, and then say the sentence back to yourself in your own words.

After that, tell one person. A pastor will do, or a friend who has crossed the street ahead of you. You don’t need to be ready, because nobody ever is, and you don’t need every intellectual objection tied off. The disciples walked with him for three years and still got remarkable quantities of it wrong.

The window is open today. He has not moved from the door, and he is expecting you.

References

Biblical References

Exodus 20:3 (ESV). The epigraph; the first commandment sets the question of which God before any question of sincerity.
John 14:5 to 6 (ESV). Thomas’s question and Jesus’s answer; verse 6 is quoted in full as the centre of the exclusive claim.
Acts 4:12 (ESV). Peter’s statement before the ruling council; shows the claim made at personal cost.
Luke 22:54 to 62. Peter’s three denials, mentioned in passing (not quoted).
Hebrews 9:27. Mentioned in passing: the New Testament’s picture of a single life before judgement (paraphrased, not quoted).
John 18:11. Jesus tells Peter to put away his sword; used to show the claim does not license violence (paraphrased, not quoted).
1 Corinthians 10:20 (ESV). Paul on what lies behind pagan sacrifice; supports taking the spiritual world seriously while naming the wrong identity.
Exodus 7:22, 8:7 and 8:18 to 19. Pharaoh’s magicians match two plagues and fail at the third; power is not proof (paraphrased, not quoted).
1 Kings 18:19 to 39 (ESV). The contest on Mount Carmel; verses 27 and 38 are quoted, the rest summarised.
John 3:16 (ESV). The one condition for eternal life, and the Father’s initiative.

Other Sources

Augustine of Hippo. (1991). Confessions (H. Chadwick, Trans.). Oxford University Press. (Original work written about 397 to 400). Paraphrased from Book 1, chapter 1.
Dictionary of African Christian Biography. (n.d.). Mbiti, John Samuel. https://dacb.org/stories/kenya/mbiti-johns/
Hackett, C. (2025, November 11). 5 facts about religion in Nigeria. Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/11/11/5-facts-about-religion-in-nigeria/
Lewis, C. S. (1952). Mere Christianity. Geoffrey Bles. (Book II, chapter 3)
Mbiti, J. S. (1969). African religions and philosophy. Heinemann. (Quoted as given at the Dictionary of African Christian Biography entry above.)
Neff, D. (2003). Review of The resurrection of the Son of God. Christianity Today. https://christianitytoday.com/ct/2003/aprilweb-only/4-14-41.0.html
Pew Research Center. (2008, June 1). U.S. religious landscape survey: Religious beliefs and practices. https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2008/06/01/u-s-religious-landscape-survey-religious-beliefs-and-practices/
Wright, N. T. (2003). The resurrection of the Son of God. Fortress Press.

Translation Notices

Scripture quotations are from the ESV Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version), copyright 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.