Written by C.N. Willborn |
Wednesday, August 21, 2024
We live in a world of absolute doubt and uncertainty about a way forward, the reality of truth, and meaning of life. The church, however, responds with hope….Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life, for He is God incarnate. Only God can be all of those things.

Years ago, I heard a leading academic figure argue his case for a tolerant environment on his historic campus. He then went on to say that his university would not tolerate intolerance. Do not miss the irony of that statement. Ironic as it is, we live in an age that boasts of “tolerance.” With that comes a vehement distaste for any claim of exclusivity. That is particularly true when Christians make exclusive claims about Christ and salvation.
The Bible is replete with exclusive claims. The antithesis of life and death are foundational to the Christian faith. The way of life and the way of death run through the Bible, illustrated in places such as Cain’s sacrifice of unbelief versus Abel’s sacrifice of faith and the juxtaposition of Esau and Jacob. Jesus Himself expressed the life/death model as the narrow and broad way—one way leads to life and one way to destruction (Matt. 7:13–14). The narrow way is personified in Jesus Christ when He said, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life” (John 14:6). This exclusive claim can be found in extrabiblical literature from the Didache (second century AD), to historic creeds and confessions, to the present time.
But a question arises at this point: How is Jesus “the way, and the truth, and the life”? There are two answers to the question, but they are inseparable. There is the objective answer and the subjective answer. Objectively, He is exclusively the way, the truth, and the life because He is God incarnate. Subjectively, His salvation is appropriated to individuals through faith in who He is and what He has done.
Considered objectively, Jesus in His person and work is “the way” because He is God. To the Jewish leadership of His day, this was an inflammatory concept. “I am” was a stout claim to deity, and they knew it (John 10:10–33). He is the way because He is God but also because He is man. He took on flesh and became the way out of the mess in which Adam landed us (Rom. 5). The way of righteousness and holiness, which Adam did not follow, Jesus followed perfectly. He could take Adam’s place, for He was born of a woman (Gal. 4:4). His perfect sacrifice could bear the sins of many, for He was God (Isa. 53:12; 1 Peter 1:24). In Him, man could be reconciled to God (Rom. 5:11; 1 Cor. 5:18–21). Only the God-man could be the way.
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By the books bearing his name, one could easily be led to think John Girardeau was a philosophical theologian of ivory tower standing. That was true, but he was first and foremost, by heart, a missionary to the poor and needy of the South Carolina Lowcountry.
On November 14, 1825, John Lafayette Girardeau was born to Claudia Herne Girardeau and John Bohun Girardeau on James Island, South Carolina. He was of French Huguenot and Scottish Presbyterian stock. The local field school trained him in the three Rs (“reading, ‘riting, and ‘rithmetic”) and more. When he was eight, his mother died, and he was sent to live in Charleston to complete his secondary education at the German Friendly Society School on Archdale Street. By age eighteen, he held valedictorian honors and a diploma in classical languages from the College of Charleston.
After studying for the ministry in the theological seminary in Columbia, he returned to the Lowcountry to pursue a life as a Presbyterian minister. He served churches near McClellanville and at Adam’s Run before he was summoned to “the Holy City” of Charleston in 1854 to assume leadership of the nascent work among the enslaved men and women there. This work was initiated by Second Presbyterian Church in 1847. He inherited a Gothic structure seating some five hundred people on Anson Street, which had been built in 1850 expressly for the slaves of Charleston. By 1859, they had outgrown their facility and moved into a mammoth structure on Calhoun Street near the corner of Meeting Street. The building was the largest church building in town, seating 1,500. They named it Zion Presbyterian Church. In Charleston, Girardeau became known as “the grandest preacher in all our Southland” and was called by one renowned minister, “the Spurgeon of America.”
Facing monumental opposition from racists, Girardeau and the white elders of Zion provided an extensive religious education program for the slaves. So successful were the elders in orally instructing the congregation in the catechism, hymns, and psalms of the church that some citizens thought they were violating the civil law which forbade teaching slaves to read and write. Girardeau also held wedding services, “til death do us part,” in the prominent church structure on Calhoun Street. Residents objected to this, concerned about the “freedom” the black membership had to stroll the streets in fine clothing.
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