One of the most difficult questions for Christians to answer, especially when posed by adherents of other religions, is the question of what happens to those who have never heard of Jesus? In this post, I will explain how progress in the field of philosophy of religion has given us a possible (and Biblical) solution to this thorny question.
First, Christianity teaches that humans are in a natural state of rebellion against God. We don’t want to know about him, and we don’t want him to have any say in what we are doing. We just want to appropriate all the gifts he’s given us, do whatever we want with them, and then have eternal bliss after we die. We want to do whatever we want and then be forgiven, later.
Along comes Jesus, who, through his sinless life and his death on the cross, heals that rift of rebellion between an all-good God and rebellious man. Now we have a real understanding of the fact that God is real, that he has power over death, and that he has very specific ideas on what we should be doing. If we accept Jesus’ atoning sacrifice and follow his teachings, we can avoid the penalty of our rebellion.
The only problem is that in order to appropriate that free gift of reconciliation, people need to actually know about Jesus. And there are some people in the world who have not even heard of him. Is it fair that these other people will be sent to eternal separation from God, just because they happened to be born in the wrong place at the wrong time?
Enter William Lane Craig to save the day. His solution is that God orders the world in such a way that anyone who would freely choose to acknowledge Jesus and appropriate his teachings in their decision-making will be given eternal life. God knows in advance who would respond, and chooses their time and place of birth, and he supplies them with the amount of evidence they need.
And this agrees with what the Bible teaches. The apostle Paul says this in his apologetic on Mars Hill in Acts 17:22-31:
22 So Paul stood in the midst of the Areopagus and said, “Men of Athens, I observe that you are very religious in all respects.
23 “For while I was passing through and examining the objects of your worship, I also found an altar with this inscription, ‘ N D ‘ Therefore what you worship in ignorance, this I proclaim to you.
24 “The God who made the world and all things in it, since He is Lord of heaven and earth, does not dwell in temples made with hands;
25 nor is He served by human hands, as though He needed anything, since He Himself gives to all people life and breath and all things;
26 and He made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined their appointed times and the boundaries of their habitation,
27 that they would seek God, if perhaps they might grope for Him and find Him, though He is not far from each one of us;
28 for in Him we live and move and exist, as even some of your own poets have said, ‘For we also are His children.’
29 “Being then the children of God, we ought not to think that the Divine Nature is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and thought of man.
30 “Therefore having overlooked the times of ignorance, God is now declaring to men that all people everywhere should repent,
31 because He has fixed a day in which He will judge the world in righteousness through a Man whom He has appointed, having furnished proof to all men by raising Him from the dead.”
In this research paper, Craig explains in detail how God foreknows how people will choose in every set of circumstances, and how God uses that knowledge to get everyone where they need to be without violating their free will. God wants the best for everybody, and has ordered to whole universe in order to give each of us our best opportunity for eternal life.
Here is a summary of the what is in his paper:
The conviction of the New Testament writers was that there is no salvation apart from Jesus. This orthodox doctrine is widely rejected today because God’s condemnation of persons in other world religions seems incompatible with various attributes of God.
Analysis reveals the real problem to involve certain counterfactuals of freedom, e.g., why did not God create a world in which all people would freely believe in Christ and be saved? Such questions presuppose that God possesses middle knowledge. But it can be shown that no inconsistency exists between God’s having middle knowledge and certain persons’ being damned; on the contrary, it can be positively shown that these two notions are compatible.
Go read this paper and equip yourself to answer this common question!
WINTERY KNIGHT 
I wrote about this topic in my blog post: http://www.lindsays-logic.blogspot.com/2014/04/what-happens-to-people-who-have-never.html
I hadn’t discussed the idea that people might be placed in history based on how God knows they will choose. I did, however, point out that God can reveal Himself to those who seek for Him based on what they already know from nature. Romans 1-2 tells us that we all have some knowledge of God and that we all have a moral law written on the heart. These things give all people the building blocks to start a search for God. If they fail to seek Him, He has no responsibility to give them any more information and they are responsible for not seeking the God they knew was there. If they seek Him, the Bible tells us they will find Him.
LikeLike
William Lane Craig has written a very long and detailed – not to say complicated – article here. In a nutshell what he seems to be saying is that although we all have free will, God knows in advance who will accept Jesus and who won’t. Therefore, even if Joe Bloggs is living thousands of miles away in the middle of the Amazon and has never heard of Jesus, he can still be saved because God knows that if Joe DID hear about Jesus then Joe would accept him.
This rather sweet line of reasoning is of course somewhat undermined by the thought that God could just send Jesus or a band of angels or some evangelicals or whoever to appear to literally everyone on the planet, and thus bring them all into contact with the Gospel. He is God, after all.
If God doesn’t bring everyone in the world into contact with the Gospel then the next question is why bother sending Jesus in the first place? If God knows how we’ll react to him without us ever having heard about him then his appearance on earth doesn’t really change anything as far as our salvation is concerned.
I will finish with a final and rather mischievous thought. Imagine that deep in the heart of the Amazon rain forest the real Messiah had turned up, say about 50 years ago. New travels slowly in that part of the world so unfortunately not many people have heard about this, certainly no one in Europe or the States. Fortunately for you, though, God knows that if you WERE aware of the new Messiah you’d accept him into your heart. It does mean that all this Christianity stuff is a waste of time though.
LikeLike
AE,
The simple answer is that there isn’t anyone who would believe who has not heard the gospel. Why? Again the simple answer to that according the Molinistic viewpoint is that God has so arranged His creation and its history so that no one who will believe is ever placed in a location or time when they will not hear what is necessary for them to believe and be justified. Short answer to your Amazon scenario is that there isn’t anyone like that and God has made sure of it.
This is not mere speculation either. Whether one believes scripture to be the inspired Word of God or not, there are passages that allude to this very thing of God’s providential placement of those who can be brought to belief in places and times in which they will be exposed to His own direct revelation to them of what is necessary for justification.
For instance, in the book of Acts 16:6-9, Paul and his companions are traveling through what is now West-Central Turkey and as they attempt to go into one province or another this is what they encounter:
[Act 16:6 NASB] They passed through the Phrygian and Galatian region, having been forbidden by the Holy Spirit to speak the word in Asia;
[Act 16:7 NASB] and after they came to Mysia, they were trying to go into Bithynia, and the Spirit of Jesus did not permit them;
[Act 16:8 NASB] and passing by Mysia, they came down to Troas.
[Act 16:9 NASB] A vision appeared to Paul in the night: a man of Macedonia was standing and appealing to him, and saying, “Come over to Macedonia and help us.”
Attempting to go first into the province then called Asia (extreme west Turkey), they were “forbidden” by the Holy Spirit to proceed. Turning Northeast toward the province then known as Bithynia, they likewise were not permitted to do so “by the Spirit of Jesus”. The obvious question is “Why?” Two possible answers may be suggested. Either those provinces had already been evangelized by some one else before Paul and his associates arrived (possibly by the Apostle John who seemed to be based in the West Turkish coastal city of Ephesus), making their travel there unnecessary, or because there simply was no one in either of those places who would be brought to faith at least at that particular moment. Instead, verse 9 records a vision Paul experienced of a man in the Greek province of Macedonia telling him to go to that place and asking Paul to “help us”. This would certainly indicate that there were those in Macedonia (already, i.e pre-Gospel) who were ready to hear Paul’s message and who would believe it.
Later, Paul finds himself in the city of Corinth and again he receives direction through a divine vision granted to him. Acts 18:9-11 reports:
[Act 18:9 NASB] And the Lord said to Paul in the night by a vision, “Do not be afraid any longer, but go on speaking and do not be silent;
[Act 18:10 NASB] for I am with you, and no man will attack you in order to harm you, for I have many people in this city.”
[Act 18:11 NASB] And he settled there a year and six months, teaching the word of God among them.
Note the words of the vision in which Paul is told by God “I have many people in this city.” This is noteworthy for several reasons. First, Paul does not seem to be aware of this large number of people that God says he already “has” in the City, and therefore it is certain that they were people who Paul had not yet encountered or he would surely be aware of them without needing a vision to tell him about them. Second, Paul had arrived in Corinth at the beginning of the chapter (18:1) and had split his time between his craft of tent-making and Sabbath day discussions in the local synagogue primarily with his Jewish countrymen and a few Greek proselytes that attended the assembly. After his assistants joined him in the city, Paul put aside his tent-making and embarked on what was a full time proclamation of his message to those in the synagogue. He was promptly met with resistance and hostility (verse 6) and abandoned the synagogue, turning instead to a house of one Titius Justus which was directly adjacent to the synagogue itself. Titius, apparently a non-jew, is called one who “worshipped God” and this is his status BEFORE Paul presented him with the message of the Gospel (note, he is not called “a believer” at this point). This would seem to make him a gentile who had come to worship the one true God, but who was not a proselyte to Judaism. The new testament frequently calls these people “God fearers”. They would be non-Jews who were recognized by God as believers under the provisions of the Old Covenant and even prior to it. There are many examples of these people in the OT: Rahab, Melchizedek, Ruth, Job, etc.
The upshot of this is simply that God already “had” people in the city that Paul had not yet met, and therefore who had not actually been exposed to the saving message of the gospel, yet in some sense God indicates to Paul that he already “has” these people. From the Molinist perspective, it may be pointed out that these people appear to have been gentile believers in the creator God who, though worshipping him, had not become proselytes to Judaism, but were in a pre-New Covenant relationship with God, and who were therefore prime candidates to be absorbed into the church through belief in God’s further revelation as found in the Gospel of Christ. It is apparent when reading through the early missionary activity as recorded in Acts that a large focus of that early activity was not directed at hardened pagans but instead toward those who already had come to worship the true creator God in some respect such as the Jews and the Gentile “God fearers”. After all, it is a mistake to assume that Jesus, and the Apostles walked onto an earthly scene where no one existed but the lost. Many were already believers under the terms of the Old Covenant and merely needed to be brought over to the new by means of the Gospel of Christ. This was the modus operandi of God in the early church and there is no reason to assume that it has changed drastically since then.
Christianity is no waste of time unless some one wants it to be.
JMG
LikeLike
AE, the real question is personal. You have heard the Gospel of Jesus Christ so what are you going to do with it (Phil. 2:12: “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.”)? We can ask an infinite number of speculative questions about everyone else but each of us must personally make a decision to accept or reject it. If you have not done so, what would keep you from doing so before it is eternally too late (John 14:6: “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life. No one comes to the Father but by me.”)?
LikeLike
“And this agrees with what the Bible teaches.”
The reformed camp would beg to differ
LikeLike
“The reformed camp would beg to differ”. It usually does, doesn’t it?
LikeLike
I think the problem that often gets overlooked is found in the first few chapters of Romans, in Paul’s discourse on sin and the sin nature, what is revealed by God in nature, and how man responds to that revelation: a few respond positively to it, but most reject it because they like their sin. The problem is that some, like Dr. Craig, place the cross ahead of the need. People have to realize that they need salvation before the cross is of any benefit. Take the OT saints, they were saved because they believed that God would save them if they acted in accordance to the revelation which they had at the time, that in due time salvation would come. That is the biblical model that has to be dealt with.
LikeLike
“God knows in advance who would respond, and chooses their time and place of birth, and he supplies them with the amount of evidence they need.”
It seems to me that the problem with this view is that if one had been born in a different time and a different place and with different people as parents, one wouldn’t have been the same person. In my view a better solution concerning this issue may be based on the idea that there are degrees of punishment in the afterlife, depending on one’s moral behaviour (Matthew 16,27, 2 Corinthians 5,10) and one’s knowledge of God’s will (Matthew 11,20-24, Luke 12,47-48, John 15,22-25). So, if someone doesn’t accept Jesus as his Lord and Saviour because he lives in a place where the Gospel is not known he may be far better off than someone who doesn’t accept Jesus as his Lord and Saviour even though he knows the Gospel.
LikeLike