CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 10
IS JESUS THE ONLY WAY TO GOD?
There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved. (Acts 4:12 RSV)
I often speak at major Canadian universities on the existence of God. I typically present a cumulative case climaxing in Jesus’ resurrection. After one of my talks, one slightly irate student wrote on her comment card, “I was with you until you got to the stuff about Jesus. God is not the Christian God!”
This attitude is pervasive in Western culture today. Most people are happy to agree that God exists; but in our pluralistic society it has become politically incorrect to claim that God has revealed Himself decisively in Jesus.
New Testament Teaching
And yet this is exactly what the New Testament clearly teaches. Take the letters of the apostle Paul, for example. He invites his Gentile converts to recall their pre-Christian days: “Remember that you were at that time without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world.” (Eph. 2:12).
It’s the burden of the opening chapters of Paul’s letter to the Romans to show that this desolate condition is the general situation of mankind. Paul explains that God’s power and deity are made known through the created order around us, so that all men are without excuse (1:20), and that God has written His moral law upon all men’s hearts, so that they are morally responsible before Him (2:15). Although God offers eternal life to all who will respond in an appropriate way to God’s general revelation in nature and conscience (2:7), the sad fact is that rather than worship and serve their Creator, people ignore God and flout His moral law (1:21–32). The conclusion: All men are under the power of sin (3:9–12).
Worse, Paul goes on to explain that no one can redeem himself by means of righteous living (3:19–20). We are therefore utterly helpless. Fortunately, however, God has provided a means of escape: Jesus Christ has died for the sins of mankind, thereby satisfying the demands of God’s justice and facilitating reconciliation with God (3:21–26). By means of His atoning death salvation is made available as a gift to be received by faith.
The logic of the New Testament is clear: The universality of sin and the uniqueness of Christ’s atoning death entail that there is no salvation apart from Christ. As the apostles proclaimed, “There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12 RSV).
This particularistic doctrine of salvation through Christ alone was just as scandalous in the polytheistic world of the Roman Empire as in contemporary Western culture. Early Christians were often subjected to severe persecution, torture, and death because they refused to embrace a pluralistic approach to religions. In time, however, as Christianity grew and became the official religion of the Roman Empire, the scandal receded. Indeed, for medieval thinkers like Augustine and Aquinas, one of the marks of the true church was its universality. To them it seemed inconceivable that the great edifice of the Christian church, filling all of civilization, should be founded on a falsehood.
The Demise of the Traditional Doctrine
The demise of this doctrine came with the so-called Expansion of Europe, that is, the three centuries of exploration and discovery from about 1450 until 1750. Through the travels and voyages of men like Marco Polo, Christopher Columbus, and Ferdinand Magellan, new civilizations and whole new worlds were discovered that knew nothing of the Christian faith. The realization that much of the world’s population lay outside the bounds of Christianity had a twofold impact upon people’s religious thinking.
First, it tended to relativize religious beliefs. People realized that far from being the universal religion of mankind, Christianity was largely confined to western Europe, a corner of the globe. No particular religion, it seemed, could make a claim to universal validity; each society seemed to have its own religion suited to its peculiar needs.
Second, it made Christianity’s claim to be the only way of salvation seem narrow and cruel. Enlightenment rationalists like Voltaire taunted the Christians of his day with the prospect of millions of Chinese doomed to hell for not having believed in Christ, when they had not so much as even heard of Christ.
In our own day, the influx into Western nations of immigrants from former colonies and the advances in telecommunications that have served to shrink the world to a global village have heightened our awareness of the religious diversity of mankind. As a result, religious pluralism—the view that there are many roads to God—has today become once again the conventional wisdom.
The Problem Posed by Religious Diversity
But what, exactly, is the problem posed by mankind’s religious diversity? And for whom is this supposed to be a problem? When you read the literature on this issue, the recurring challenge seems to be laid at the doorstep of the Christian particularist, the person who says Christ is the only way to God. The phenomenon of religious diversity is taken to imply the truth of pluralism, and the main debate then becomes the question of which form of pluralism is the most plausible. But why think that Christian particularism is untenable in the face of religious diversity? What exactly seems to be the problem?
Fallacious Arguments for Pluralism
When you examine the arguments on behalf of pluralism, you’ll find many of them to be almost textbook examples of informal fallacies.
For example, it’s frequently asserted that it’s arrogant and immoral to hold to any kind of religious particularism because you then have to regard everybody who disagrees with you as mistaken. Therefore, religious particularism is false.
This seems to be a textbook example of the logical fallacy known as “argument ad hominem,” which tries to invalidate a position by attacking the character of those who hold to it. This is a fallacy because the truth of a position is independent of the moral character of those who believe it. To illustrate: Imagine a medical scientist who finally discovers an AIDS vaccine that really works. Suppose, moreover, that this fellow is really full of himself. He boasts openly of his discovery, he claims that he deserves the Nobel Prize, he looks down on his colleagues as mental midgets because they didn’t discover the vaccine, and so on. Clearly, he’s arrogant and immoral in his behavior. But does that do anything to undermine the truth of his claim to have discovered the sole AIDS vaccine? More pointedly, if you had AIDS, would you refuse to take his vaccine because he is arrogant and immoral? I hope not! The truth of a position is independent of the character of those who hold it. In the same way, even if it were the case that all religious particularists were arrogant and immoral, that would do nothing to prove that their particular views are false.
Not only that, but why think that arrogance and immorality are necessary conditions of being a particularist? Suppose I’ve done all I can to discover the truth about God. Suppose I’ve studied various religions; I’ve sincerely sought God in prayer. Suppose as a result of my search I’m convinced that Christianity is true, and so I humbly embrace Christian faith as an undeserved gift of God. Am I arrogant and immoral for believing what I sincerely think is true? What else can I do but believe it? I think it’s true!
Finally, and even more fundamentally, this objection is a double-edged sword. For the pluralist also believes that his view is right and that all those adherents to particularistic religious traditions are wrong. Therefore, if holding to a view that many others disagree with means you’re arrogant and immoral, then the pluralist himself would be convicted of arrogance and immorality.
Do you think it’s arrogant for a religious pluralist to believe that his view is right and all religious particularists are wrong? Explain.
Genetic Fallacy
Or to give another example, it’s frequently alleged that Christian particularism can’t be correct because religious beliefs are culturally relative. For example, if you had been born in Pakistan, you would likely have been a Muslim. Therefore your belief in Christianity is false or unjustified.
But again this seems to be a textbook example of what’s called the “genetic fallacy.” This is trying to invalidate a position by criticizing the way a person came to hold that position. The fact that your beliefs depend upon where and when you were born has no relevance to the truth of those beliefs. If you had been born in ancient Greece, you would probably have believed that the sun orbits the Earth. Does that imply that your belief that the Earth orbits the sun is therefore false or unjustified? Obviously not!
And once again, the pluralist pulls the rug from beneath his own feet: For had the pluralist been born in Pakistan, then he would likely have been a religious particularist! Thus, on his own analysis his pluralism is merely the product of his being born in late twentieth-century Western society and is therefore false or unjustified.
The Problem with Christian Particularism
Thus, some of the arguments you frequently hear against Christian particularism are pretty unimpressive. But don’t think that because such fallacious arguments are often given on behalf of religious pluralism therefore pluralism doesn’t pose a serious challenge to Christian belief. On the contrary, I think it does. But clearing away these fallacious arguments can help us to get to the real problem lurking in the background.
The real problem concerns the fate of unbelievers outside of one’s own particular religious tradition. Christian particularism consigns such persons to hell, which pluralists take to be unconscionable.
Nowhere is this problem better illustrated than in the life of my own doctoral mentor, John Hick. Professor Hick began his career as a relatively conservative Christian theologian. His first book was entitled Christianity at the Centre. But as he began to study the other world religions and to become acquainted with many of their saintly followers, he found it simply inconceivable that such good people should be on their way to hell. 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 retained, Christ could not be successfully marginalized. Hick therefore came to edit The Myth of God Incarnate, in which he argues that these central Christian doctrines are not true but mere myths. He wrote:
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?[1]
This is the real problem raised by the religious diversity of mankind: the fate of those who stand outside the Christian tradition.
Is Hell the Problem?
But what exactly is the problem here supposed to be? What’s the problem with holding that salvation is available only through Christ? Is it supposed to be simply that a loving God wouldn’t send people to hell?
How easy is it for you to respond coolly and rationally, rather than emotionally, to the idea that people who have never heard about Christ will face eternal suffering? What helps you do that? What makes it harder?
I don’t think so. The Bible says that God wills the salvation of every human being: “The Lord is … not willing that any should perish but that all should come to repentance” (2 Peter 3:9 NKJV). Or again, He “desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth” (1 Tim. 2:4 RSV). God says through the prophet Ezekiel:
Have I any pleasure in the death of the wicked, says the Lord GOD, and not rather that he should turn from his way and live?… For I have no pleasure in the death of any one, says the Lord GOD; so turn, and live!… Say to them, As I live, says the Lord GOD, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from his way and live; turn back, turn back from your evil ways; for why will you die? (Ezek. 18:23, 32; 33:11 RSV)
Here God literally pleads with people to turn back from their self-destructive course of action and be saved.
Thus, in a sense, God doesn’t send anybody to hell. His desire is that everyone be saved, and He seeks to draw all persons to Himself. If we make a free and well-informed decision to reject Christ’s sacrifice for our sin, then God has no choice but to give us what we deserve. God will not send us to hell—but we shall send ourselves.
Our eternal destiny thus lies in our own hands. It’s a matter of our free choice where we shall spend eternity. Those who are lost, therefore, are self-condemned; they separate themselves from God despite God’s will and every effort to save them, and God grieves over their loss.
Does the Punishment Fit the Crime?
Now the pluralist might admit that given human freedom God can’t guarantee that everyone will be saved. Some people might freely condemn themselves by rejecting God’s offer of salvation. But, he might argue, it would be unjust of God to condemn such people forever. For even terrible sins like those of the Nazi torturers in the death camps still deserve only a finite punishment. Therefore, at most hell could be a sort of purgatory, lasting an appropriate length of time for each person before that person is released and admitted into heaven. Eventually hell would be emptied and heaven filled. Thus, ironically, hell is incompatible, not with God’s love, but with His justice. The objection charges that God is unjust because the punishment doesn’t fit the crime.
But, again, this doesn’t seem to me to be the real problem. For the objection seems flawed in at least two ways:
First, the objection equivocates between every sin we commit and all the sins we commit. We could agree that every individual sin that a person commits deserves only a finite punishment. But it doesn’t follow from this that all of a person’s sins taken together as a whole deserve only a finite punishment. If a person commits an infinite number of sins, then the sum total of all such sins deserves infinite punishment.
Now, of course, nobody commits an infinite number of sins in the earthly life. But what about in the afterlife? Insofar as the inhabitants of hell continue to hate God and reject Him, they continue to sin and so accrue to themselves more guilt and more punishment. In a real sense, then, hell is self-perpetuating. In such a case, every sin has a finite punishment, but because sinning goes on forever, so does the punishment.
Second, why think that every sin does have only a finite punishment? We could agree that sins like theft, lying, adultery, and so forth are only of finite consequence and so deserve only a finite punishment. But, in a sense, these sins aren’t what separates someone from God. For Christ has died for those sins; the penalty for those sins has been paid. One has only to accept Christ as Savior to be completely free and cleansed of those sins.
But the refusal to accept Christ and His sacrifice seems to be a sin of a different order altogether. For this sin repudiates God’s provision for sin and so decisively separates someone from God and His salvation. To reject Christ is to reject God Himself. And in light of who God is, this is a sin of infinite gravity and proportion and therefore plausibly deserves infinite punishment. We should not, therefore, think of hell primarily as punishment for the array of sins of finite consequence that we’ve committed, but as the just penalty for a sin of infinite consequence, namely the rejection of God Himself.
Is the Problem Lack of Information?
But perhaps the problem is supposed to be that a loving God wouldn’t send people to hell because they were uninformed or misinformed about Christ. People who have never heard of Christ or have been given a distorted picture of Christ can’t be expected to place their faith in Christ.
But again, this doesn’t seem to me to be the heart of the problem. For according to the Bible, God doesn’t judge people who have never heard of Christ on the basis of whether they’ve placed their faith in Christ. Rather God judges them on the basis of the light of God’s general revelation in nature and conscience that they do have. The offer of Romans 2:7—“To those who by patiently doing good seek for glory and honor and immortality, he will give eternal life”—is a bona fide offer of salvation. Someone who senses his need of forgiveness through his guilty conscience and flings himself upon the mercy of the God revealed in nature may find salvation. This is not to say that people can be saved apart from Christ. Rather it’s to say that the benefits of Christ’s atoning death can be applied to people without their conscious knowledge of Christ.
Such persons would be like certain people mentioned in the Old Testament such as Job and Melchizedek, who were saved only through Christ but who had no conscious knowledge of Christ. They weren’t even members of the covenant family of Israel, and yet they clearly enjoyed a personal relationship with God. Similarly, there could be modern-day Jobs living among that percentage of the world’s population that has yet to hear the gospel of Christ.
Unfortunately, the testimony of the New Testament, as we’ve seen, is that people don’t generally measure up even to these much lower standards of general revelation. So there are little grounds for optimism about there being many people, if any at all, who will actually be saved through their response to general revelation alone. Nonetheless, the point remains that salvation is universally accessible through God’s general revelation in nature and conscience. So the problem posed by religious diversity can’t be simply that God would not condemn persons who are uninformed or misinformed about Christ.
The Real Problem
Rather it seems to me that the real problem is this: If God is all-knowing, then He knew who would freely receive the gospel and who would not. But then certain very difficult questions arise:
(1) Why didn’t God bring the gospel to people who He knew would accept it if they heard it, even though they reject the light of general revelation that they do have?
To illustrate: Imagine a North American Indian living prior to the arrival of Christian missionaries. Let’s call him Walking Bear. Let’s suppose that as Walking Bear looks up at the heavens at night and as he sees the intricacy and beauty of nature around him, he senses that all of this has been made by the Great Spirit. Furthermore, as Walking Bear looks into his own heart, he senses there the moral law, telling him that all men are brothers made by the Great Spirit and therefore we ought to live in love for one another.
But suppose that instead of worshipping the Great Spirit and living in love for his fellow man, Walking Bear ignores the Great Spirit and creates totems of other spirits and that rather than loving his fellow man he lives in selfishness and cruelty toward others. In such a case Walking Bear would be justly condemned before God on the basis of his failure to respond to God’s general revelation in nature and conscience.
TALK ABOUT IT
Do you think many people are saved without a conscious knowledge of Christ, because of their response to general revelation? What leads you to think that?
But now suppose that if only the missionaries had arrived, then Walking Bear would have believed the gospel and been saved! In that case his salvation or damnation seems to be the result of bad luck. Through no fault of his own he just happened to be born at a time and place in history when the gospel was not yet available. His condemnation is just; but would an all-loving God allow people’s eternal destiny to hinge on historical and geographical accident?
(2) More fundamentally, why did God even create the world, when He knew that so many people would not believe the gospel and be lost? Since creation is a free act of God, why not simply refrain from creating any free creatures at all?
(3) Even more radically, why didn’t God create a world in which everyone freely believes the gospel and is saved? Such a world must be logically possible, since people are free to believe or not believe. So why didn’t God create a world in which every person freely chooses to place his faith in Christ and be saved?
What’s the Christian supposed to say in answer to these questions? Does Christianity make God out to be cruel and unloving?
The Problem Analyzed
In order to answer these questions it will be helpful to examine more closely the logical structure of the problem before us. The problem seems to be very similar to the logical version of the problem of suffering that we examined in chapter 7. The pluralist seems to be claiming that it’s impossible for God to be all-powerful and all-loving and yet for some people to never hear the gospel and be lost. That is to say, the pluralist claims that the following statements are logically inconsistent:
1. God is all-powerful and all-loving.
2. Some people never hear the gospel and are lost.
Thus, Christian particularism is logically incoherent.
Is There an Inconsistency?
But now we need to ask, why think that 1 and 2 are logically inconsistent? After all, there’s no explicit contradiction between them. But if the pluralist is claiming that 1 and 2 are implicitly contradictory, he must be assuming some hidden premises that would serve to bring out this contradiction and make it explicit. The question is, what are those hidden premises?
I must say that I’ve never seen any attempt on the part of religious pluralists to identify those hidden assumptions. But let’s try to help the pluralist out a bit. It seems to me that he must be assuming something like the following:
3. If God is all-powerful, He can create a world in which everybody hears the gospel and is freely saved.
4. If God is all-loving, He prefers a world in which everybody hears the gospel and is freely saved.
Since, according to 1, God is both all-powerful and all-loving, it follows that He can create a world of universal salvation and that He prefers such a world. Therefore such a world exists, in contradiction to 2.
Now both of the hidden premises must be necessarily true if the pluralist is to prove the logical incompatibility of 1 and 2. So the question is, are these assumptions necessarily true?
Consider 3: It seems uncontroversial that God could create a world in which everybody hears the gospel. That’s no big deal. But so long as people are free, there’s no guarantee that everybody in such a world would be freely saved. In fact, when you think about it, there’s no reason to think that the balance between saved and lost in such a world would be any better than the balance in the actual world!
It is logically impossible to make someone freely do something. Being all-powerful does not mean having the ability to do the logically impossible. So there’s no guarantee that a possible world in which everyone hears the gospel and is freely saved is feasible for God to create. For all we know, in any world of free people that God could create, some people would freely reject His saving grace and be lost. Hence, 3 is not necessarily true, and so the pluralist’s argument is fallacious.
TALK ABOUT IT
Are people raised in Christian homes getting more grace for salvation than people raised in communities where the gospel is unknown? If not, why not? If so, is this a failure of love on God’s part?
But what about 4? Is it necessarily true? Let’s suppose for the sake of argument that there are possible worlds that are feasible for God in which everyone hears the gospel and freely accepts it. Does God’s being all-loving compel Him to prefer one of these worlds over a world in which some persons are lost?
Not necessarily; for the worlds involving universal salvation might have other, overriding deficiencies that make them less preferable. For example, suppose that the only worlds in which everybody freely believes the gospel and is saved are worlds with only a handful of people in them, say, three or four. If God were to create any more people, then at least one of them would have freely rejected His grace and been lost. Must He prefer one of these sparsely populated worlds over a world in which multitudes believe in the gospel and are saved, even though that implies that other persons freely reject His grace and are lost?
That’s far from obvious. So long as God gives sufficient grace for salvation to all persons He creates, God seems no less loving for preferring a more populous world, even though that implies that some people would freely resist His every effort to save them and be damned. Thus, the pluralist’s second assumption is also not necessarily true, so that his argument is revealed to be doubly fallacious.
So neither of the pluralist’s assumptions seems to be necessarily true. Unless the pluralist can suggest some other premises, we have no reason to think that 1 and 2 are logically incompatible.
There Is No Inconsistency
But we can push the argument a notch further. We can show positively that it’s entirely possible that God is all-powerful and all-loving and that many persons never hear the gospel and are lost.
As a good and loving God, God wants as many people as possible to be saved and as few as possible to be lost. His goal, then, is to achieve an optimal balance between these, to create no more of the lost than is necessary to attain a certain number of the saved. But it’s possible that the actual world (which includes the future as well as the present and past) 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 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 that an all-loving God would not create people who He knew will be lost, but who would have been saved if only they had heard the gospel. But how do we know there are any such persons? It’s reasonable to assume that many people who never hear the gospel wouldn’t have believed the gospel even if they had heard it. Suppose, then, that God in His mercy has so providentially ordered the world that all persons who never hear the gospel are precisely such people. God is too good to allow someone to be lost due to historical or geographical accident.
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 judgment day and complain, “All right, God, so I didn’t respond to Your general revelation in nature and conscience! But if only I had heard the gospel, then I would have believed!”
For God will say, “No, I knew that even if you had heard the gospel, you wouldn’t have believed it. Therefore, My judgment of you on the basis of nature and conscience—which you willingly turned your back on—is neither unfair nor unloving.”
Thus, it’s possible that:
5. God has created a world that has an optimal balance between saved and lost, and those who never hear the gospel and are lost would not have believed in it even if they had heard it.
So long as 5 is even possibly true, it shows that there’s no inconsistency between an all-powerful, all-loving God and some people’s never hearing the gospel and being lost.
On this basis we’re now prepared to offer possible answers to the three difficult questions that prompted this inquiry. To take them in reverse order:
(3) Why didn’t God create a world in which everyone freely believes the gospel and is saved?
Answer: It may not be feasible for God to create such a world. If such a world were feasible, then (all else being equal) God would have created it. But given His will to create free creatures, God had to accept that some would freely reject Him and His every effort to save them and be lost.
(2) Why did God even create the world, when He knew that so many people would not believe the gospel and be lost?
Answer: God wanted to share His love and fellowship with created persons. He knew this meant that many would freely reject Him and be lost. But He also knew that many others would freely receive His grace and be saved. The happiness and blessedness of those who would freely embrace His love should not be precluded by those who would freely spurn Him. Persons who would freely reject God and His love should not be allowed, in effect, to hold a sort of veto power over which worlds God is free to create. In His mercy God has providentially ordered the world to achieve an optimal balance between saved and lost by maximizing the number of those who freely accept Him and minimizing the number of those who would not.
(1) Why didn’t God bring the gospel to people who He knew would accept it if they heard it, even though they reject the light of general revelation that they do have?
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, do hear it. The sovereign God has so ordered human history that as the gospel spreads out from first-century Palestine, He places people in its path who would believe it if they heard it. Once the gospel reaches a people, God providentially places there persons who He knew would respond to it if they heard it. In His love and mercy, God ensures that no one who would believe the gospel if he heard it is born at a time and place in history where he fails to hear it. Those who don’t respond to God’s general revelation in nature and conscience and never hear the gospel wouldn’t respond to it if they did hear it. Hence, no one is lost because of historical or geographical accident. Anyone who wants or even would want to be saved will be saved.
I want to emphasize that these are just possible answers to the questions we posed. But so long as they’re even possible, they show that there’s no incompatibility between God’s being all-powerful and all-loving and some people’s never hearing the gospel and being lost.
Furthermore, these answers are attractive because they also seem to be 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 17:24–28 NIV)
This sounds exactly like the conclusion to which I have come through purely philosophical reflection on the question!
Plausibility of the Solution
Now the pluralist might concede the logical possibility of God’s being all-powerful and all-loving and some people’s never hearing the gospel and being lost but insist that these two facts are nonetheless improbable with respect to each other. People by and large seem to believe in the religion of the culture in which they were raised. But in that case, the pluralist might argue, it’s 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 been saved. Thus, the hypothesis I’ve offered is highly implausible.
Now it would, indeed, be fantastically improbable that by happenstance alone it just turned out that all those who never hear the gospel and are 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 a God endowed with knowledge of how every person would freely respond to His grace in whatever circumstances God might place him, it’s not at all implausible that God has ordered the world in the way described.
We’ve seen that the logical argument for pluralism doesn’t hold up, but what about the emotional problem of imagining millions of people consigned to hell, some of whom have lived admirable lives? How do we address that emotional problem?
Such a world wouldn’t look outwardly any different from a world where 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 non-Christian cultures had been born in a Christian society instead, they would have become nominally or culturally Christian. But that’s not to say that they would have been saved. It’s a simple empirical fact that there are no distinguishing psychological or sociological traits between persons who receive Christ and persons who don’t. There’s 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 in the way I suggest 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’ve defended can be said to be improbable—apart from a demonstration that the existence of a God endowed with such knowledge is implausible. And I don’t know of any such demonstration.
Conclusion
In conclusion, then, pluralists haven’t been able to show any logical inconsistency in Christian particularism. On the contrary, we’ve been able to prove that such a position is logically coherent. More than that, I think such a view is not only possible, but plausible as well. Therefore mankind’s religious diversity doesn’t undermine the Christian gospel of salvation through Christ alone.
In fact, for those of us who are Christians, I think that what I’ve said helps to put the proper perspective on Christian missions: It’s our duty as Christians 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. Our compassion toward those in other world religions is expressed, not by pretending they are not lost without Christ, but by supporting and making every effort ourselves to communicate to them the life-giving message of Christ.
It’s my hope that the material contained in this book will help you to become a more effective communicator of the gospel to a lost and dying world. Review it, memorize the premises of the arguments, discuss the issues with Christian friends, and then as occasion arises share it with others when you find yourself called upon to give an answer for the hope within.
[1] John Hick, “Jesus and the World Religions,: in The Myth of God Incarnate, ed. John Hick (London: SCM, 1977), 180.