Mentoring

Do good people in non-Christian religions go to Heaven?

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Here’s an article from Greg Koukl of Stand to Reason.(H/T Apologetics Junkie)

He answers the question “Am I going to Hell if I don’t believe in Jesus?”.

Excerpt:

Sometimes we have to reframe a critic’s question in order to give an accurate answer. The questions, Am I going to Hell if I don’t believe in Jesus?, is an example. As it is asked, it makes it sounds as though Jesus were the problem, not the answer. As though failing a theology quiz sends us to Hell. Instead, we need to reframe the question to answer accurately and show that sin is the problem, and Jesus is the only way because He alone has solved that problem. Sinners don’t go to Hell for failing petty theology quizzes.

While giving a talk at a local Barnes & Noble, someone asked why it was necessary for him to believe in Jesus. He was Jewish, believed in God, and was living a moral life. Those were the important things, it seemed—how you lived, not what you believed.

To him the Christian message depicted a narrow-minded God pitching people into Hell because of an arcane detail of Christian theology. How should I answer?

Remember that the first responsibility of an ambassador is knowledge—an accurately informed message. What is our message?

One way to say it is, “If you don’t believe in Jesus, you’ll go to Hell. If you do believe, you’ll go to Heaven.”

That’s certainly true, as far as it goes. The problem is it’s not clear. Since it doesn’t give an accurate sense of why Jesus is necessary, it makes God sound petty.

So how do we fix this? Here’s how I responded to my Jewish questioner. I asked him two simple questions.

Read the rest of the article.

Christians all need to understand how to explain why sincere beliefs and good works are not enough to satisfy God’s moral demands on us. My friend thinks that if a person is a “good” person, then he should go to Heaven. But God is not the Tooth Fairy. God is more concerned that we understand the truth about his existence and character – that is the whole point of sending Jesus to die as an atonement for our rebellion. The problem isn’t that we lie, cheat and steal. The problem is that we want to get our own happiness apart from God, without wanting to know him as he is, and without having to care about his goals and his character in the relationship.

Here’s what God wants us to know about ourselves:

  • we have to realize that what we really are is rebels against God
  • rebels don’t want God to be there
  • rebels don’t want God to have any goals or character different from their goals and character
  • rebels don’t want God to place any demands on them
  • rebels don’t want to have any awareness that God is real or that he is morally perfect
  • rebels want to be liked as they are now – they don’t want to change as part of a relationship
  • rebels want to conceive of their own way to happiness, and to use other people and God for their own ends
  • rebels don’t want there to be a mind-independent objective reality, they want to invent their own reality that allows them to be praised and celebrated for doing whatever makes them happy at every point along their lives
  • rebels would rather die that put their pursuit of happiness second
  • rebels have no interest in rules, judgments, accountability or punishments

Here’s what God wants for us to be saved from our rebelling:

  • we have to know his real character so we have a genuine relationship with him
  • the best way to know his character is by taking time to study what Jesus did in history
  • what the incarnation tells us is that God is willing to humiliate himself by taking on a human nature
  • what the crucifixion tells us is that God is willing to die in our place even though we’re rebelling against him (Jesus is Savior)
  • part of being saved is to trust God by allowing his character to transform our desires and actions (Jesus is Lord)
  • as we grow in letting the character of Jesus inform our actions, we build a set of experiences that are like Jesus’ experiences – i.e. – we obey God rather than men, and we suffer for our obedience – just like Jesus

Jesus came to give his life as a ransom for our rebellion against God, and the most important thing we have to do in this life is to come to terms with who he was and what he did. Your own good deeds don’t justify you before God, because he isn’t interested in what you can do unless you are first interested in knowing who he is. A Christian’s good deeds are the result of identifying Jesus as Savior and Lord, and then following him by making decisions in your own life that respect his character. God doesn’t need you to solve all the world’s problems – he could do that himself. It’s not what you do, it’s who you know and trust that counts. The good deeds are just your way of trying to be like him and trying to feel the same thing he felt when he gave his life for you. You have a friend and you want to be like him in order to know what he feels so you have sympathy with him.

The main point is that knowing Jesus as the revelation of God’s character, and then following Jesus, is more important than doing “good things”.

The first commandment, according to Jesus, is found in Matthew 22:34-38:

34Hearing that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, the Pharisees got together.

35One of them, an expert in the law, tested him with this question:

36“Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?”

37Jesus replied: ” ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’

38This is the first and greatest commandment.

The second commandment which comes after that one has to do with loving your neighbor. But the second one is not the greatest commandment. You can’t love God unless you know God. That it, unless you make knowing about his existence and character a priority in your life to the point where you find out the truth about his existence and character. And not as your own opinion, or as the opinion of the people around you, or as the faith-tradition you were raised in. No. You have to value God enough to respond to his overtures to you. You have to know him in truth, not as a quick checkbox that you check off for an hour on Sundays to make your life “easier” because you are happier and the people around you like you. You have to know him before you can act to love him – who he is and what he’s done.

The way that Protestants like me draw the line is as follows – justification (how your rebellion is canceled) is God’s job. He draws you to him while you are still in rebellion, but you have a choice to resist him or not. If you resist his unilateral action to save you, then you are responsible for rejecting him. Sanctification (about doing good works) is not about canceling your rebellion, it’s about the later step of re-prioritizing your life, so that you make decisions that reflect the character of Jesus, so that you become more like him. Even your desires change as the relationship progresses. It is something you work at – you study and experience, study and experience. The whole point of studying apologetics is to build yourself into a love machine that fears nothing and holds up under fire, because you know the truth and the truth makes you free to do what you ought to do regardless of the consequences (e.g. – failure to be recognized and requited by someone you loved well).

The most important relationship is not the horizontal relationship with your neighbor, it’s the vertical relationship with God himself. And when you know God as he really revealed himself in history, then your desires – and consequently your actions – will change naturally. When you know God as a person, you freely make all kinds of sacrifices for him. You put yourself second because you want to work on the relationship. You start to believe that your own happiness isn’t as as important as working on the relationship. It’s like building a house. You don’t notice the sacrifices.

Sometimes, I think that the whole point of Christianity and that vertical relationship is so that we know God better. We sympathize more with him than we do with ourselves, because of how unfairly people treat him, how good and loving he is, and how right his goals are. It’s not that he needs help, because he’s God – he’s sovereign. But the relationship gets to the point where it becomes reasonable for you to put yourself second with God, and to let his goals become your goals – you want the relationship with a loving God more than you want to be happy. You get tired of ignoring the person who loves you most – you start to wonder what it would be like to actually respond to him. For Christians, the demands of this other being eventually seem to be not so terrible after all – and we try to put aside our own desires and to give him gifts and respect instead of worrying so much about being happy all the time.

It’s not irrational to be kind to the person who loves you the most – who sacrificed the most for you.

Related posts

Here is a series of posts I did on why people go to Hell.

6 thoughts on “Do good people in non-Christian religions go to Heaven?”

  1. Allow me to ask the obvious question.

    When / Where in the bible did “heaven’ become the goal ?
    It is NOT Scriptural. If it is – where is it stated ? Shouldn’t the bible be full of references ?

    Paul ( who wrote the most books in the bible) spoke of being crucified with Christ and the power of His resurrection so that he could obtain the “first resurrection” (Phil 4).

    Christ spoke of Eternal Life, the Kingdom, discipleship, and relationship to Him, Holy Spirit, and the Father (John 14-17).

    None of the apostles wrote about heaven being the goal – none. It was all about change from the Old Covenant to the New Covenant and including a certain “elect” of Jews and Gentiles.

    The bulk of the rewards are given “ONLY” to those who overcome (Rev. 2 & 3). The other 2 groups of people are “saved nations” (see matt 25) and the wicked (see matt 25).

    The old & new testament support this entirely.

    By making “heaven” the goal demolishes Gods requirement for obedience, holiness, and righteousness ( ie a changed person in the image/fellowship of Christ ) .
    Nothing is accomplished by death and passing into the spiritual realm – nothing. In fact the last enemy destroyed is death ( 1 Cor 15:26).
    Death is separation from God (no spiritual life – that is what “died in Adam”).
    That is the real issue and a frightening reality (2 Cor 5:11) and you reap what you sow.

    Gods original plan was to have fellowship with man and create man to be His throne ( ie judge – see psalm 8:4-6 & Heb 2:6-8). Not the other way around. God wants a dwelling place (Rev 21:3 & ) and it is with and “in” people not the other way around (Is 66 & Acts 7)

    It is pretty simple – Christ came to change what we reap so we can sow eternal life.This is accomplished by Christ/Father dwelling in me/you so matter where we are – “it is paradise”.

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  2. This doesn’t cover “Sorry, but I just don’t buy it”

    It also doesn’t cover the total absence of evidence for God in my life. I tried to be a Christian for over 40 years. Finally feel intellectually (even, ironically “spiritually”) honest to be able to say, “sorry, I just don’t buy it”

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  3. Hmm — good post, but I am not sure that St Paul would agree that “love your neighbor” is not the greatest commandment, since he wrote in Gal. 5.14, “The entire law is summed up in a single command: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.'”

    Paul thus subsumes loving God under loving neighbor. I would say, though, that it is not possible to love God truly unless one also loves one’s neighbor, nor is it possible to love neighbor unselfishly unless one is also filled with the love of God. “Love the Lord your God … and your neighbor as yourself” are not separable; they are mutually necessary parts or the one, single, and unified Great Commandment. And I think that in the Gospels, Jesus presents them as such.

    But excellent point that the central issue is love, not the finer points of theology or ecclesiology. As a Southern Baptist relative told me, when the thief on the cross asked Jesus to remember him, Jesus didn’t reply, “Only if you were baptized the right way.”

    Remember, in Matthew 25 is is (at least nominal) Christians to whom Jesus says, “I never knew you,” when they exclaim they didn’t ever see him naked. And Rev. 20:13 is, I think, unambiguous is saying that when the dead rise, “each person [will be] judged according to what they had done.”

    When I stand before the Lord when that times comes, I don’t expect he’ll require me to recite the Apostles Creed or the Lord’s Prayer, or explain the theory of atonement. All the scenes of judgment in the New Testament really come down to being required to account for only one thing. I wrote about that here.

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  4. A couple of points stand out:

    Love – is action / behavior and not emotions as stated in 1 Cor and is a pretty darn hard thing to do.
    “Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it his not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.”

    I believe the intimate words of love were spoken by Christ on the cross to the thief ” be with me” ( Wow – that really moves me beyond words – it is far more intimate than “I love you” it is a invitation of love at the highest level of love ie “they follow the Lamb wherever He goes” and “where I am there you may be also” )

    In review of Matt 25 – these are not ‘nominal Christians / disciples / saints ‘. In review, they are called righteous and enter into eternal life based on how they treat the brothers/sisters of Christ. There is no profession or let alone knowledge no repentance, no baptism – they simply have no idea why ( the scriptures support this for both types). This is the “saved nations” as mentioned in Is 2:3.

    Lets take a look at Matt 25
    Then the righteous will answer him, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink?
    And when did we see you a stranger and welcome you, or naked and clothe you?
    And when did we see you sick or in prison and visit you?’And the King will answer them, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.’

    In context of Rev 20:13 – back up a couple of verses. It shows the elect/elite/first fruits that Paul was referring to.
    4 I saw thrones on which were seated those who had been given authority to judge. And I saw the souls of those who had been beheaded because of their testimony for Jesus and because of the word of God. They had not worshiped the beast or his image and had not received his mark on their foreheads or their hands. They came to life and reigned with Christ a thousand years. 5(The rest of the dead did not come to life until the thousand years were ended.) This is the first resurrection. 6Blessed and holy are those who have part in the first resurrection. The second death has no power over them, but they will be priests of God and of Christ and will reign with him for a thousand years.

    All this “bucks” church tradition.

    The reason why this is important is that most people who profess Christ dont act as such. This is why people have a hard time with accepting Christianity. There is no difference or worse behavior between Christians and non Christians.

    Christian discipleship is a about “abiding in Christ” ( do a word search for “in Christ” – it is pretty astounding and speaks volumes) vs a “ticket to heaven”.

    This ticket/belief/heaven concept rips the guts out of Christian discipleship and is destructive betond words.

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  5. It’s interesting to consider that ‘Good Jews’ (pre-Christ, I’m thinking proper Old Testament Jews) were saved. It’s equally interesting to consider that people such as Enoch, Abraham, Moses, Joseph, etc. etc. were saved, and not only were they pre-Christian, but pre-‘Jew’ as well. *But*, it’s important to note that God had revealed Himself to these people(s), just as he revealed Himself in Christ.

    So, do ‘good people in non-Christian religions go to heaven’? I’m inclined to think not; I’m inclined to think that if such a person were seeking true knowledge of God, then it would be provided to them, and they would then follow ‘that God’ rather than the religion they once subscribed to. So even if such a person were to live in some remote jungle with no access to missionaries and no knowledge of Christ or Christianity, if they lived in accordance to what’s been revealed to them, then by extension they live in accordance with Christ.

    I guess, then, that salvation is a matter of revelation?

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