Jesus: Privileged Path or Only Path?
The Council of Florence in the 15th Century stated:
The Council firmly believes, professes and preaches that never was anyone, conceived by a man and a woman, liberated from the devil’s dominion except by faith in our Lord Jesus Christ, the mediator between God and humanity, who was conceived without sin, was born and died.
The New Covenant of Jesus Christ is universal and it alone is what brings man to deification. There are many today who believe that Jesus is a path to God or a really good path to God. Some might even say that He is the privileged path to God. Yet, as the Council of Florence clearly states, echoing Scripture, that only the God-man Jesus Christ can liberate us from sin’s embrace and bring us to eternal salvation. If someone is saved outside the visible bounds of the Church by God’s inscrutable grace, it is nonetheless, through the instrumentality of the Church that they are saved.
Jesus is the ONLY path to God because He is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. No one comes to the Father except through Him. This is because the redemption won by Christ on the Cross was sealed with His Holy Blood. The New Covenant is a covenant in His blood. God knew that this would be a lot for us to take in, so He prepared us gradually and in stages.
His saving plan was progressively revealed in a series of covenants. First, the covenant with Adam and Eve was a covenant of God with the first married couple. The covenant with Noah was with a family. With Abraham it was with a tribe. With Moses, it was with a nation. And with David, it was a covenant with a kingdom. Just as human beings grow gradually and in stages, so too did God reveal His plan of salvation gradually and in stages.
But when the fullness of time had come, He revealed everything He wished to reveal about Himself in the Person of Jesus Christ. He reconciled the world to Himself in the Paschal Mystery of His suffering, death, resurrection, and ascension. And He extended kinship through the New Covenant to anyone who would receive the gift of Faith in Baptism. He alone is the Mediator between God and man.
For a much more eloquent and beautiful affirmation of the unicity and salvific universality of Jesus Christ and the Church, please read this awesome declaration from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, called Dominus Iesus, from August 2000. It was written when Cardinal Ratzinger was prefect of the CDF and it is excellent!