8 Christ, the Only Way
CHRIST,
THE ONLY WAY
Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12). Thus the earliest apostles of Christ believed, and thus they preached. That name they preached was, of course, the name of Jesus of Nazareth, and it was through Him and Him alone that salvation was to be found. Indeed, this conviction permeates the New Testament and helped to spur the mission to the Gentiles. Paul invited his Gentile converts to recall their pre-Christian days: “Remember that at that time you were separated from Christ, excluded from citizenship in Israel, and foreigners to the covenants of the promise, without hope and without God in the world” (Eph. 2:12).
The burden of the opening chapters of Romans is to show that this desolate situation is the general condition of mankind. Although God’s eternal power and deity are evident through creation (Rom. 1:20) and although God offers eternal life to all who seek Him in well-doing (2:7), the tragic fact of the matter is that in general people suppress the truth in unrighteousness, ignoring the Creator (1:18-21) and flouting the moral law (1:32). Therefore, “Jews and Gentiles alike are all under sin. As it is written: ‘There is no one righteous, not even one; there is no one who understands, no one who seeks God’” (3:9b-11). Sin is the great leveler, rendering all needy of God’s forgiveness and salvation. Given the universality of sin, all persons stand morally guilty and condemned before God, utterly incapable of redeeming themselves through righteous acts (3:19-20). But God in His grace has provided a means of salvation from this state of condemnation: Jesus Christ, by His expiatory death, redeems us from sin and justifies us before God (3:21-26). It is through Him and through Him alone, then, that God’s forgiveness is available (5:12-21). To reject Jesus Christ is therefore to reject God’s grace and forgiveness, to refuse the one means of salvation that God has provided. It is to remain under His condemnation and wrath, to forfeit eternal salvation. For someday God will judge all people, punishing “those who do not know God and do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus. They will be punished with everlasting destruction and shut out from the presence of the Lord and from the majesty of his power” (2 Thess. 1:8-9).
It wasn’t just Paul who held to this exclusivist, Christocentric view of salvation. The apostle John likewise saw no salvation outside of Christ. In John’s Gospel, Jesus declares, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6). John explains that people love the darkness of sin rather than light, but that God has sent His Son into the world to save the world and to give eternal life to everyone who believes in the Son. “Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because he has not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son” (John 3:18). People are already spiritually dead; but those who believe in Christ pass from death to life (John 5:24). In his epistles, John asserts that no one who denies the Son has the Father, and he identifies such a person as the antichrist (1 John 2:22-23; 4:3; 2 John 7). In short, “He who has the Son has life; he who does not have the Son of God does not have life” (1 John 5:12). In John’s Apocalypse, it is the Lamb alone in heaven and on earth and under the earth who is worthy to open the scroll and its seven seals, for it was He that by His blood ransomed people for God from every tribe and tongue and people and nation on the earth (Rev. 5:1-14). In the consummation, everyone whose name is not found written in the Lamb’s book is cast into the everlasting fire reserved for the devil and his cohorts (20:15).
One could make the same point from the other epistles in the New Testament as well. It is the conviction of the writers of the New Testament that “there is one God and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself as a ransom for all men” (1 Tim. 2:5-6a).
Indeed, this seems to have been the attitude of Jesus Himself. Jesus came on the scene with an unparalleled sense of divine authority, the authority to stand and speak in the place of God Himself and to call people to repentance and faith. Moreover, the object of that faith was He Himself, the absolute revelation of God: “All things have been committed to me by my Father. No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal him” (Matt. 11:27). On the Day of Judgment, a person’s destiny will be determined by how he responded to Jesus: “I tell you, whoever acknowledges me before men, the Son of Man will also acknowledge him before the angels of God” (Luke 12:8). Frequent warnings concerning hell are found on Jesus’ lips, and it may well be that He believed that most of mankind would be damned, whereas only a minority of mankind would be saved: “Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it” (Matt. 7:13-14). A hard teaching, no doubt; but the logic of the New Testament is simple and compelling: the universality of sin and the uniqueness of Christ’s sacrifice entail that there is no salvation apart from Christ.
Although this particularity was scandalous in the polytheistic world of the first century, with the triumph of Christianity throughout the Roman Empire the scandal receded. Indeed, one of the classic marks of the church was its catholicity, and for men like Augustine and Aquinas the universality of the church was one of the signs that the Scriptures are divine revelation, since so great a structure could not have been generated by and founded upon a falsehood. Of course, Jews remained in Christian Europe, and later the armies of Islam had to be combated, but these exceptions were hardly sufficient to overturn the catholicity of the church or to promote religious pluralism.
But with the so-called “Expansion of Europe” during the three centuries of exploration and discovery from 1450 to 1750, the situation changed radically. It was now seen that, far from being the universal religion, Christianity was confined to a small corner of the globe. This realization had a twofold impact upon people’s religious thinking. First, it tended toward the relativization of religious beliefs. Since each religious system was historically and geographically limited, it seemed incredible that any of them should be regarded as universally true. It seemed that the only religion that could make a universal claim upon mankind would be a sort of general religion of nature. Second, it tended to make Christianity’s claim to exclusivity appear unjustly narrow and cruel. If salvation was only through faith in Christ, then the majority of the human race was condemned to eternal damnation, since they had not so much as even heard of Christ. Again, only a natural religion available to all men seemed consistent with a fair and loving God.
In our own day the influx into Western nations of immigrants from former colonies, coupled with the advances in telecommunications that have served to shrink the world toward what Marshall McLuhan has called a “global village,” has heightened both of those impressions. The impact upon Christian missions has been huge. Mainline denominations have to a great extent lost their sense of missionary calling or have been forced to reinterpret missions in terms of social engagement with peoples of the Third World, a sort of Christian Peace Corps, if you will, whereas those who continue to adhere to the traditional, orthodox view are denounced for religious intolerance. This shift is perhaps best illustrated by the attitude of the Second Vatican Council toward world mission. In its Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, the Council declared that those who have not yet received the gospel are related in various ways to the people of God. Jews, in particular, remain dear to God, but the plan of salvation also includes all who acknowledge the Creator, such as Muslims. People who through no fault of their own do not know the gospel, but who strive to do God’s will by conscience, can also be saved. The Council therefore declared in its Declaration on NonChristian Religions that Catholics now pray for the Jews, not for the conversion of the Jews, and it also declared that the church looks with esteem upon Muslims. Missionary work seems to be directed only toward those who “serve the creature rather than the Creator” (see Rom. 1:25, RSV) or are utterly hopeless. Carefully couched in ambiguous language and often apparently internally inconsistent, the documents of Vatican II could easily be taken as a radical reinterpretation of the nature of the church and of Christian missions, according to which great numbers of non-Christians are really part of the people of God and therefore not appropriate subjects of evangelism.
In recent years certain evangelical theologians have begun to compromise on this question as well. For example, in an address to the Evangelical Theology Group at the meeting of the American Academy of Religion in San Francisco in November of 1992, Clark Pinnock declared: “I am appealing to evangelicals to make the shift to a more inclusive outlook, much the way the Catholics did at Vatican II.” Pinnock expresses optimism that great numbers of the unevangelized will be saved. He says, “God will find faith in people without the person even realizing he/she had it.” He even entertains the possibility of people being given another chance after death, freed from the effects of sin:
Imagine it—People are raised from the dead by the power of Jesus’ resurrection, free of whatever had obscured the love of God and prevented them from receiving it in life. . . . God is a serious lover who wants everyone with no opportunity to respond to His offer to have one. No sinner is excluded, who, having been included in salvation by God, but lacking opportunity to respond to grace [sic].
Pinnock realizes that his view raises the question, Doesn’t this undermine both the rationale and urgency of world mission? No, says Pinnock, for:
1. God has called us to engage in mission work and we should obey. But notice that this supplies no rationale as to why God should have issued such an apparently pointless command. It just amounts to blind obedience to a command lacking any rationale.
2. Missions is broader than just securing people’s eternal destiny. In other words we’re back to the idea of the Christian Peace Corps.
3. Missions should be positive; it is not an ultimatum, “Believe or be damned!” Well, of course not; but it is difficult to see, with such an understanding, why the task of world mission should retain any sense of urgency. Why should I drag off my wife and children to spend fifteen of the best years of our lives struggling as missionaries in Kyrgyzstan when the people there are already saved?
I find it terribly ironic that, just as the church is on the verge of completing the task of world evangelization, it should be her own theologians who would try to trip her at the finish line!
The most radical response to our heightened awareness of the religious diversity of mankind is religious pluralism. The pluralist finds it inconceivable that any one particular religion should be true, and all the others false. So he advocates a pluralistic approach. Religious pluralism comes in two forms: what we might call unsophisticated religious pluralism, and sophisticated religious pluralism.
Unsophisticated religious pluralism responds to the phenomenon of religious diversity by saying, “They’re all true! All of the world’s great religions are basically saying the same thing.”
Now this view, which one often hears expounded by laypeople and college sophomores, is rooted in ignorance of what the world’s great religions teach. Anyone who has studied comparative religions knows that the worldviews propounded by these religions are often diametrically opposite one another. Just take Islam and Buddhism, for example. Their worldviews have almost nothing in common. Islam believes that there is a personal God who is omnipotent, omniscient, and holy, and who created the world. It believes that people are sinful and in need of God’s forgiveness, that everlasting heaven or hell awaits us after death, and that we must earn our salvation by faith and righteous deeds. Buddhism denies all of these things. For the classical Buddhist ultimate reality is impersonal, the world is uncreated, there is no enduring self, life’s ultimate goal is not personal immortality but annihilation, and the ideas of sin and salvation play no role at all. Examples like this could be multiplied.
Clearly all religions cannot be true. For they have contradictory views about the nature of ultimate reality, the world, man, moral values, and so on. They could all be false, but they cannot all be true. Unsophisticated religious pluralism is therefore untenable.
So what the sophisticated religious pluralist says is that all the world’s religions are, in fact, false. None of them is true! They are all culturally relative ways of misconstruing reality. Ultimate reality, which you cannot accurately call “God,” should be given some nondescript name like “the Real” or “the Absolute.” Nothing can be known about it, but the world’s religions all picture it in different ways. Though literally false, all the world’s great religions are effective in transforming people’s lives.
Sophisticated religious pluralism raises a host of questions, but I want to focus on just one: Why think that religious pluralism is true? That is to say, why can’t only one, particular religion be true? What’s wrong with religious particularism? Specifically, what’s wrong with Christian particularism?
Well, some of the objections to Christian particularism offered by religious pluralists are just obvious logical fallacies. For example, pluralists often say that it’s arrogant and immoral to claim that any one, particular religion is true. But this appears to be a textbook example of the logical fallacy philosophers call argumentum ad hominem, that is to say, trying to invalidate a position by attacking the character of the people who hold to it. For example, let’s imagine that some medical researcher finally discovers an AIDS vaccine, and let’s suppose that he is the only one to have made this discovery. But now suppose that he also happens to be an absolute jerk. He goes around bragging about his discovery and telling everyone that he has discovered the only vaccine that will ward off AIDS. He boasts that he deserves the Nobel Prize for his accomplishment. He looks down on his colleagues as mental midgets because they lacked his brilliance and ambition to discover the vaccine. He is totally arrogant and conceited. Now does his arrogance do anything at all to undermine the truth that he did discover the only AIDS vaccine? Obviously not! No one in his right mind would regard the vaccine as ineffective and refuse to take it simply because the person announcing it to the world was arrogant. The truth of the claim is independent of the character of the person making the claim. In exactly the same way, it is irrelevant to the truth of a particular religious worldview whether its adherents are arrogant or not.
In any case, why think that religious particularists must be arrogant? Suppose I’ve done my best to figure out which religion, if any, is true. I’ve read the various scriptures and attended meetings and talked with each religion’s adherents and listened thoughtfully to what they’ve had to say. Moreover, I’ve prayed about my quest and sought spiritual guidance on my path. And suppose that as a result of my honest search, I’m convinced that Christianity alone is true. What else can I do but believe in it? I think it’s the truth! What else am I supposed to do? If I believe in Christ because I’m convinced that his claims are true, how can I be denounced as arrogant?
In fact, this objection turns out to be a double-edged sword. For if it is arrogant and immoral to hold a religious belief that is rejected by most other people and that implies that their religious beliefs are false, then it follows that the religious pluralist himself is arrogant and immoral. For he thinks everybody else’s religious beliefs are false, that the religious pluralist alone has seen the truth. Only religious pluralists, who are a tiny minority of mankind, are right, and everybody else is wrong. How arrogant can you get!
Another bad argument against religious particularism is that people’s religious beliefs are culturally relative: for example, if you had been born in Pakistan, you would likely be a Muslim; but if you had been born in Ireland, you’d more likely have been at least nominally a Catholic. Therefore, none of these particular religious beliefs can be true.
This argument is a textbook example of the logical fallacy that philosophers call the genetic fallacy. This is trying to invalidate a view by showing how a person came to hold that view. Such a move is obviously fallacious. For example, as a twenty-first-century Westerner you believe that the earth is roughly spherical and orbits the sun. But if you had been born in ancient Greece, you would have likely believed that the sun orbits the earth, and maybe even that the earth is flat. So does that mean that your belief that the earth goes around the sun or that the earth is round is therefore false, or unjustified? Obviously not!
And this argument, too, turns out to be a double-edged sword. For if the religious pluralist had been born in Pakistan or Spain, then he would likely have been a religious particularist! So by his own argument, his religious pluralism is false. His believing it is just the accidental result of his being born in late twentieth-century, politically correct, Western society!
Now please don’t think that, just because such fallacious arguments are often given on behalf of religious pluralism, pluralism does not pose a serious challenge to Christian belief. On the contrary, I think that it does. But clearing away these fallacious arguments can help us to get to the real problem lurking in the background. That problem concerns the fate of unbelievers outside of one’s particular religious tradition. That problem is especially poignant for Christians, who believe that salvation from sin and eternal life are to be found only through Christ’s atoning death on the cross. Given the universality of sin and the uniqueness of Christ’s substitutionary death on our behalf, it follows that salvation is found only through Christ. But religious pluralists find this unconscionable.
Nowhere is this better illustrated than in the life of my own doctoral mentor John Hick. Hick began his career as a relatively conservative Christian theologian. His first book was entitled Christianity at the Centre.1 But as Hick began to study the other world religions and to become acquainted with many of their saintly adherents, he found it simply inconceivable that such good people should be on their way to hell. But he realized what that meant. Somehow he had to get Jesus Christ out of the center. So long as Christ’s incarnation and atoning death were preserved, Christ could not be successfully marginalized. Hick therefore came to produce a book entitled The Myth of God Incarnate, in which he argues that these central Christian doctrines are not true but mere myths. He wrote:
For understood literally, the Son of God, God the Son, God-incarnate language implies that God can be adequately known and responded to only through Jesus; and the whole religious life of mankind, beyond the stream of Judaic-Christian faith is thus by implication excluded as lying outside the sphere of salvation. This implication did little positive harm so long as Christendom was a largely autonomous civilization with only relatively marginal interaction with the rest of mankind. But with the clash between the Christian and Muslim worlds, and then on an ever broadening front with European colonization throughout the earth, the literal understanding of the mythological language of Christian discipleship has had a divisive effect upon the relations between that minority of human beings who live within the borders of the Christian tradition and that majority who live outside it and within other streams of religious life.
Transposed into theological terms, the problem which has come to the surface in the encounter of Christianity with the other world religions is this: If Jesus was literally God incarnate, and if it is by his death alone that men can be saved, and by their response to him alone that they can appropriate that salvation, then the only doorway to eternal life is Christian faith. It would follow from this that the large majority of the human race so far have not been saved. But is it credible that the loving God and Father of all men has decreed that only those born within one particular thread of human history shall be saved?2
This is the real problem raised by the religious diversity of mankind: the fate of those who stand outside one’s own particular religious tradition.
But what exactly is the problem supposed to be here? What’s wrong with saying that salvation is to be found through Christ alone?
Is the problem supposed to be simply the idea that a loving God wouldn’t send people to hell? Is that what the problem is? Well, I don’t think so. The Bible says that God desires all men to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth (1 Tim. 2:4; 2 Pet. 3:9). Therefore, through the work of the Holy Spirit, God draws all men to Himself, seeking to convict them of sin and bring them to repentance. Anybody who makes a free and well-informed decision to reject Christ thus seals his own fate; he is self-condemned. His damnation can’t be blamed on God: on the contrary, he has resisted God’s every effort to save him. He separates himself from God forever, in defiance of God’s will that he be saved. In a sense, then, God doesn’t send anybody to hell—people send themselves.
Is the problem then supposed to be that a loving God wouldn’t send people to hell if they are uninformed or misinformed about Christ? Is that what the problem is supposed to be? Well, again, that doesn’t seem to be the heart of the problem. God is fair, and according to Romans 1 and 2, God doesn’t judge people who haven’t heard about Christ by the same standard as those who have. It would be manifestly unfair to condemn people for not believing in Christ when they’ve never heard of Christ. Rather, God judges them on the basis of the information that they do have, as God has revealed it to all mankind in nature and conscience. Theologians call this God’s general revelation, and it is by their response to its light that people without the gospel will be judged. According to Paul, all mankind can know through nature that a Creator God exists, and they can know through their own conscience God’s moral law and their failure to live up to it. Simply on the basis of nature and conscience, then, all people everywhere should recognize their guilt before God and repent, seeking His mercy and forgiveness.
Unfortunately, it is the sad testimony of Scripture that people don’t even live up to this standard. They ignore the Creator and worship gods of their own making, and they flout the moral law, immersing themselves in immorality. Therefore, even when judged by standards much lower than those revealed in the gospel, the mass of humanity stands condemned before God. Oh, it’s conceivable that a few might recognize God and His moral law and turn to Him in repentance and faith and that God might accordingly apply to them the benefits of Christ’s blood so that they might be saved without a conscious knowledge of Christ. They would be like certain Old Testament figures like Job and Melchizedek, who had no conscious knowledge of Christ and, indeed, were not even Israelites or members of the old covenant, but who nevertheless enjoyed a saving relationship with God in virtue of Christ’s atoning death. So even where the message of Christ is yet unknown, salvation is universally accessible to anyone at any time through a faith response to God’s general revelation in nature and conscience. But if we take Scripture seriously, then it’s evident that very few people actually access salvation in this way. Most people freely turn their backs on God’s general revelation in nature and conscience.
Rather the real problem posed by religious particularism seems to me to be this: if God is all-knowing, as the Bible declares Him to be, then even prior to His creation of the world, God must have known who would receive Christ and be saved and who would not. But if this is the case, then certain difficult questions arise:
1. Why didn’t God bring the gospel to people who reject the light of general revelation that they have, but who would have believed if only they had heard the gospel?
2. More fundamentally, why did God even create the world at all, if He knew that so many people would not receive Christ and would therefore be lost?
3. Even more radically, why didn’t God create a world in which He knew everyone would freely receive Christ and be saved?
These are hard questions! How is the Christian supposed to reply? Does Christianity make God out to be cruel and unloving?
In order to answer these questions, we need to probe more deeply into the logic of the problem before us. Basically, what the pluralist is saying is that it is impossible for God to be all-powerful and all-good and yet for some people never to hear the gospel and to therefore be lost. He’s saying that if God really has those attributes, then anybody and everybody who exists must be saved.
But why is this the case? After all, there’s no explicit contradiction between the statements “God is all-powerful and all-loving” and “Some people never hear the gospel and are therefore lost.” If the pluralist is saying that these statements are implicitly contradictory, then he must be assuming some hidden premises that would bring out the contradiction and make it explicit. Let’s try to ferret out these assumptions. It seems to me that they are two in number:
(i) If God is all-powerful, He can create a world in which everybody hears the gospel and is freely saved.
(ii) If God is all-loving, He prefers a world in which everybody hears the gospel and is freely saved.
Given the necessary truth of (i) and (ii), says the pluralist, it follows from God’s being all-powerful and all-loving that everyone must hear the gospel and be freely saved, which is incompatible with Christian particularism.
Now in order for the pluralist’s reasoning to be sound, both of these hidden premises must be necessarily true. But are they? Let’s see.
Let’s look at the first assumption, that If God is all-powerful, He can create a world in which everybody hears the gospel and is freely saved. I think we can agree that God could create a world in which everybody hears the gospel. But so long as creatures are genuinely free, it is by no means clear that He can bring it about that everybody would freely believe in the gospel and be saved. Being all-powerful does not mean being able to do logical impossibilities, like make a round triangle or a married bachelor. Indeed, such contradictory combinations of words don’t really describe any things at all. It is logically impossible to make someone freely do something. For being made to do an action by someone else is logically inconsistent with your doing the action freely. To do an action freely just means that you do it without anyone else’s making you do it. Therefore, so long as people are free, there’s no guarantee that in a world in which everybody heard the gospel, everybody would be freely saved. In fact, when you think about it, there’s no guarantee that in such a world the balance between saved and lost would be any better than the balance in the actual world! It’s possible that in any world of free creatures which God could create, some people would freely reject Him and be lost.
So it seems that the first assumption is just not necessarily true. It may not be within God’s power to create a world in which everyone hears the gospel and is freely saved. The pluralist’s argument is therefore invalid.
But what about that second assumption, that If God is all-loving, He prefers a world in which everybody hears the gospel and is saved over a world in which some people are lost? Is that assumption necessarily true? Let’s concede for the sake of argument that the first assumption is true: there are possible worlds that God could create in which everyone hears the gospel and freely accepts it. Does God’s being all-loving compel Him to prefer one of these worlds to the actual world? Not necessarily. For these worlds might have other, overriding deficiencies that make them less preferable. For example, suppose the only worlds in which everybody hears and freely believes the gospel are worlds with only a handful of people in them, say, three or four. If God created any more people, then at least one of them would not believe and so would be lost. Now I ask you: does God’s being all-loving compel Him to prefer one of these radically underpopulated worlds over a world in which multitudes freely receive Christ and are saved, though some others freely reject Christ? That’s not at all obvious to me! Why should the joy and blessedness of those who would freely receive Christ be precluded by some other people who would freely spurn God’s love and forgiveness? So long as God offers sufficient grace for salvation to all people, I don’t see that He is any less loving for preferring a more populous world, even though that means some people would freely reject Him and His every effort to save them and therefore would be lost.
So neither of the crucial assumptions made by our objector is necessarily true. God’s being all-powerful doesn’t guarantee that He can create a world in which everybody freely receives Christ, nor does God’s being all-loving compel Him to prefer a world in which everybody is saved over a world in which some are lost. If either one of these assumptions is not necessarily true, then the pluralist’s whole argument is invalid. Since both of these assumptions fail, the pluralist’s case is doubly invalid.
But we can even go one step further than this. We can actually prove that it’s entirely consistent to believe that God is all-powerful and all-loving and that some people never hear the gospel and are therefore lost.
To begin with, since He is good and loving, God wants as many people as possible to be saved and as few people as possible to be lost. His goal, then, is to create no more of the lost than is necessary to achieve a certain number of the saved. In other words, God wants heaven to be as full as possible and hell to be as empty as possible, and He needs to find the optimal balance between these.
But it’s possible that the actual world has such a balance! It’s possible that in order to create this many people who will be saved, God also had to create this many people who will be lost. It’s possible that had God created a world in which fewer people go to hell, then even fewer people proportionately would have gone to heaven. It’s possible that in order to achieve a multitude of saints, God had to accept a multitude of sinners.
It might be objected, however, that an all-good God would not create persons who He knew would be lost as a by-product of His creating persons who He knew would be saved. But this objection misconstrues my proposal. It is true that the existence of lost people is an undesired concomitant of a world having people who freely receive God’s grace and are saved. But that does not imply that God’s plan of salvation does not include those who freely reject it and are lost. Remember, God loves everyone He creates and gives sufficient grace for salvation to each one of them. Indeed, some of the lost may actually receive greater grace than some of the saved. The lost are not created as mere means to some end, say, the salvation of the elect. Rather as persons created in God’s image the lost are ends in themselves and are loved and valued by God, who wills their salvation and strives to achieve it. But of their own free will some people reject God’s loving initiatives and are lost. It remains God’s will and desire that all mankind, including those who finally separate themselves from God forever, be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth.
But someone might further object that God would not create persons who He knew will be lost but who would have been saved if only they had heard the gospel. But how do we know that there are such persons? It’s reasonable to assume that many people who never hear the gospel would not have believed the gospel even if they had heard it. After all, not everybody believes in the gospel and is saved when missionaries finally succeed in bringing the Good News to some previously unreached people group. Thus, it’s reasonable to think that at least some people who never hear the gospel and are lost would not have believed in it even if they had heard it. Suppose, then, that God has so providentially ordered the world that all persons who never hear the gospel are precisely such people. In that case, anybody who never hears the gospel and is lost would have rejected the gospel and been lost even if he had heard it. No one could stand before God on the Judgement Day and complain, “Sure, God, I didn’t respond to your revelation in nature and conscience, but if only I had heard the gospel, then I would have believed!” God would say, “No, I knew that even if you had heard the gospel, you wouldn’t have believed it. Therefore, my judgement of you on the basis of nature and conscience is neither unfair nor unloving.”
Thus, it’s possible that God has created a world which has an optimal balance between saved and lost and that those who never hear the gospel and are therefore lost would not have believed in Christ even if they had heard of Him. So long as this scenario is even possible, it proves that there is no incompatibility between an all-powerful, all-loving God and some people’s not hearing the gospel and thus being lost.
Now let me head off a possible misunderstanding at this point. Somebody might say, “Well, why engage in missionary work, then, if all the people who are unreached would not receive Christ even if they heard of Him?” The question forgets that we’re talking only about people who never hear the gospel. God in His providence can so arrange the world that as the gospel spreads out from first-century Palestine, He places people in its path who would believe it if they heard it. In His love and mercy, God ensures that no one who would believe the gospel if he heard it remains ultimately unreached. Once the gospel reaches a people group, God providentially places there persons who He knew would respond to it if they heard it. He ensures that those who never hear it are only people who wouldn’t accept it even if they did hear it.
So now we’re ready to provide possible answers to the three difficult questions that prompted our discussion. Let’s take them in reverse order:
1. Why didn’t God create a world in which He knew everyone would freely receive Christ and be saved? Answer: It may not be within God’s power to create such a world. If such a world were feasible, God would have created it. But given His will to create free creatures, God had to accept the fact that some would reject Him and be lost.
2. Why did God create the world, if He knew that so many people would not receive Christ and would therefore be lost? Answer: God wanted to share His love and fellowship with created persons. This constitutes an incommensurable good for human beings. God knew that this meant that many would freely reject Him and be lost. But the blessedness and happiness of those who would accept Him should not be precluded by those who would freely reject Him. Those who would willingly reject God and forfeit salvation should not be allowed to have a sort of “veto power” over which worlds God is free to create. But God in His loving-kindness has providentially ordered the world to achieve an optimal balance between the saved and the lost by maximizing the number of those who accept Him and minimizing the number of those who do not.
3. Why didn’t God bring the gospel to people who reject the light of general revelation that they have, but who would have believed if only they had heard the gospel? Answer: There are no such people. God in His providence has so arranged the world that those who would respond to the gospel if they heard it are born at a time and place in history where they do hear it. Those who do not respond to God’s revelation in nature and conscience and never hear the gospel would not have responded to it even if they did hear it. Hence, no one is lost because of a lack of information or due to historical or geographical accident. Anyone who wants—or even would want—to be saved will be saved.
These are only possible answers to the difficult questions we set for ourselves. Are they true answers? Only God knows! The important point to be grasped here is that so long as the scenario we have constructed is even possible, it proves that there is no incompatibility between God’s being all-powerful and all-loving and some people’s not hearing the gospel and thus being lost.
But before we conclude, I want to add that one of the attractions of the proposed scenario for me is that it does seem quite biblical as well. In his open-air address to the Athenian philosophers gathered on the Areopagus, Paul declared:
The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and . . . gives all men life and breath and everything else. From one man he made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live. God did this so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us. “For in him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:24-28a).
Paul’s description of God’s providential arrangement of the world’s peoples with a view toward their reaching out and finding God is remarkably in line with the conclusion I have reached through philosophical reflection alone.
Now the pluralist might concede the logical compatibility of God’s being all-powerful and all-loving and some people’s never hearing the gospel and thus being lost, but insist that the scenario I have envisioned is nonetheless very improbable. For people by and large seem to believe in the religion of the culture in which they were raised. But in that case, the pluralist may argue, it is highly probable that if many of those who never hear the gospel had been raised in a Christian culture, they would have believed the gospel and would have been saved. Thus, the hypothesis I have offered is highly implausible.
It would, indeed, be fantastically improbable that by happenstance alone it just turns out that all those who never hear the gospel and are therefore lost are persons who would not have believed the gospel even if they had heard it. But that’s not the hypothesis! The hypothesis is that a provident God has so arranged the world. Given an all-knowing God who knows how every person would freely respond to His grace in whatever circumstances God might place him, it is not at all implausible that God has ordered the world in the way described. Such a world wouldn’t look outwardly any different from a world in which the circumstances of a person’s birth are a matter of happenstance. We can agree that people generally adopt the religion of their culture and that if many of those born into nonChristian cultures had been born in a Christian society instead, they would have been culturally Christian. But that’s not to say that they would have been saved. The pluralist might insist that such a world as I envision would look significantly different than the actual world. He might claim that persons who would have been merely cultural Christians (had they been born in a Christian society) would look different somehow from persons who would have become regenerate Christians. But this claim is manifestly untrue. It is a simple empirical fact that there are no distinguishing psychological or sociological traits between persons who become Christians and persons who are nonbelievers. There is no way to predict accurately by examining a person whether and under what circumstances that person would believe in Christ for salvation. Since a world providentially ordered by God would appear outwardly identical to a world in which one’s birth is a matter of historical and geographical accident, it’s hard to see how the hypothesis I have defended can be deemed to be improbable.
Some people might be troubled that such a scenario sounds disturbingly Euro-centric and racist, implying that white Westerners are the good believers while all the people of the Third World are hardened infidels. But apart from its philosophical problems,3 such a misgiving betrays an ignorance of contemporary demographics. Recall the statistics presented in chapter 5 on the growth of evangelical Christianity over the ages. Today evangelical Christianity is growing at a rate over three times faster than the world’s population. In the Third World evangelical Christianity is undergoing an explosive increase. Did you realize that in 1987 the number of evangelicals in Asia surpassed the number of evangelicals in North America? Did you realize that just four years later in 1991 the number of evangelicals in Asia surpassed the number of evangelicals in the entire Western World? Christianity is not a Western, white man’s religion. Today two-thirds of evangelicals live in the Third World. Moreover, do you realize that most of the people who have ever lived on the face of this planet are alive right now, at this very moment? When you reflect on the fact that what philosophers call “the actual world” includes not only all of the past and the present but all of the future as well, then the problem of the unevangelized may be seen in its true perspective. As time goes on, the percentage of the human race who never heard the gospel will dwindle to a small fraction, while those who embrace the gospel will, Lord willing, grow and grow until it comprises a great multitude “from every tribe and tongue and people and nation” (Rev. 5:9), of which Caucasians are but a minority.
In conclusion, then, it seems that the presence of other world religions does not undermine the Christian gospel of salvation through Christ alone. On the contrary, what we’ve said helps to put the proper perspective on Christian missions: it is our duty to proclaim the gospel to the whole world, trusting that God has so providentially ordered things that through us the Good News will come to persons who God knew would accept it if they heard it. There are literally divine appointments out there waiting for you. Our compassion toward those in other world religions is expressed, not in pretending they are not lost and dying without Christ, but by supporting and making every effort ourselves to communicate to them the life-giving message of the gospel of Christ.
1 John Hick, Christianity at the Centre (London: SCM, 1968).
2 John Hick, “Jesus and the World Religions,” in John Hick, ed., The Myth of God Incarnate (London: SCM, 1977), 179-180.
3 The objector has a flawed anthropology: he thinks a person is identical to his body. But given the biblical anthropology of body-soul dualism, one’s particular body is an accidental feature of one’s being. The same soul could have been instantiated in a Caucasoid, Negroid, or Mongoloid body. Thus, one’s race or ethnicity is not an essential feature of one’s identity (which is one reason why racism is so stupid, we being all essentially similar). So if God knew that a person would not have received Christ were he a twelfth-century Incan, but would have done so were he a twentieth-century Nigerian, that would give God reason to create that person as the Nigerian rather than as the Incan. Today God may be providentially placing those who would believe in the Third World rather than in Europe!