One of the common objections of the Fundamentalist's elitist concept of salvation to the more charitable understanding of spiritual salvation held by certain other followers of Christ, is a passage found in Matthew 7:14 - "Strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it" Here, naturally, the Fundamentalist might say that only by being Born Again according to their concept of salvation, can a person "get saved" or "be saved" and that all other ways lead to destruction.
However, if the Literalist was able to set aside his conditioning for one second, he would see that he has made for himself a narrow mind instead of perceiving the narrow way which Jesus the Christ was talking about.
Once again, we must return to the original Christ, we must look at Christ as Christ was and is. Choosing to be born into poverty although He deserved a King's welcome; working ceaselessly and tirelessly, first for His family and then for mankind; being so humble that He washed the feet of His own followers; teaching endlessly about love, compassion, understanding, forgiveness and the Kingdom of God; healing the sick and bringing hope to the poor and downhearted; giving up all and taking nothing with Him wherever He went, and calling with an unimaginable courage to others to do the same; the King of kings condemned to the Cross by those He truly loved and whom He had come to save, sacrifice in the highest sense because of the love thrown back which crucified Him eventually. All of these things and more, owning nothing of the world, being humble of heart, taking on and enduring to the end the deep heartaches of life and the sorrows of others - these are the kind of things which constitute the narrow way - The Christ Way.
As always, the things of Christ are simple, very simple; but man has taken the simple things of Jesus and added his own complicated dogmatic teachings. And the Fundamentalist, intolerant of other faiths and belief systems to greater or lesser degree, passes into another world to find that he is not so elevated as he expected and has much to work out because of his lack of interest and charitable acceptance of his brother - he has failed to do what he would like to have done to himself: to accept. And now he must learn to truly accept others who think differently to himself but he has cast his thoughts and presumptions in clay although he had the chance to accept others according to the way that Christ demonstrated.
Furthermore, many who have formed habits of thought based on an erroneous idea of their position after physical death, continue to live in denial of truth once the physical body has been dropped, thus shutting themselves off from the beauty of God's reality, and it may take much time and effort by those who are free from such bonded thinking to awaken them to the higher reality which could be theirs.
Looking at the mechanics of the transition in general, many pass out of the earth life with their lessons unlearnt because they chose a life of material desire and had no room nor great interest in the state of health of their soul-bodies. And so each goes to his own place according to the state of health of his soul. If it is still full of earthly desire, then the brighter Spheres of God which have been culled out of the hearts and minds of dedicated people willing to sacrifice - these Spheres are not available to the one who neglected his spiritual path while on earth, and much time and hard work has yet to pass before he is in a state of spiritual health where he can climb the steep hill to God through the increasingly purified Heavenly Spheres. While on earth either the desire for power, possessions, the adulation of the masses or freedom from true spiritual commitment were prominent, and the path which leads to the life which God desires the individual to have was not followed nor indeed found.
"Strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it" is of course consistent with Christ's other teachings; for instance, as an example to show the context Christ used when delivering His teachings: "It is as difficult for a rich man to enter into the Kingdom of Heaven as it is for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle". These teachings are not based on dogmatic claims of a limited salvation for the minority, they are based on the state of a person's heart and spirituality. Christ Jesus was drawing comparisons between the broad way and the narrow way: the broad way was the way of physical desire of the lesser self, the desire to control and rule others, to possess power and riches, the living of an easy, comfortable and carefree life which avoids true responsibility, burdens and spiritually profitable experiences; and the narrow way was the Christ Way, the Way He laid down in Person as He walked the Earth and gently displayed Divine Love for all to see.
The narrow Way, as spoken by Christ, has nothing at all to do with the acceptance of a contrived metaphysical concept i.e. being made perfect for the upper echelons of Heaven in an instant by accepting a belief just once while living in a body of flesh on Earth; or in other words, the narrow Way is not about salvation being achieved by believing a metaphysical concept once - as the extreme Fundamentalist Christian dogmatic teaching claims.
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