For my part, I think the exclusiveness of the Christian community is essential to its witness. The Church has clear boundaries: a public pledge of allegiance to Christ above all others, marked by the waters of baptism (and the ongoing rite of communion). Only when the Church knows itself as the Church can it become possible for the world to know itself as the world (and thus, in need of ‘salvation’).

Christian exclusivity is only problematic, I would suggest, within the context of a non-biblical afterlife theology that makes ‘heaven’ the inheritance of Christians and ‘hell’ the inheritance of everyone else. For many reasons, I think that scheme is to be rejected. However, the existence of a distinct people which exists both to witness to the goodness of the Creator and to serve the world is just what ‘justice’ requires! There can be no ‘common’ cause without a common conception of the good. That conception of the good is provided to Christians by the story they tell about the kind of God who has created and called them. ‘Softening’ the boundaries of the Christian faith would make the shared task impossible, for that task precisely derives its intelligibility, and its strength as witness, from the story which describes it, and that story is not universally shared.

Oh the joys of Anabaptist theology…

My two cents,

 -Daniel-