As stated, this says nothing about the status of those who don’t believe. It only says that those who believe will get to heaven–allowing nonbelievers into heaven is entirely consistent with John 3:16.
Unfortunately, what follows John 3:16 is John 3:17 and 3:18. Your thesis is correct so far as it goes – allowing nonbelievers into heaven is consistent with John 3:16 standing by itself. But here are the next two verses:
Grew up Catholic, with the Catholic position, as il Topo already pointed out, that it isn’t the specific belief, but a striving for the truth that separates the saved from the damned.
That’s what I grew up with. For myself, I don’t consider myself a Christian, and I don’t believe in hell, so I’d say that they all look a fair bit like “Christians” to me, but none of them are guaranteed to find God.
Julie
A and B for sure. C possibly, D probably, E probably not. I’d have to read the details of their theology to taxonomize them.
**
Dunno. Ask the boss.
**
Raised Southern Baptist, Bible college grad, now Episcopalian.
I believe in a God so loving that he would condemn none of his children. Earth received the Eggton version – our Testaments contain accurate text about Jesus’s divinity. However, many of the moral and ethical teachings are wildly inaccurate.
The Bobopolis would not be Christians; they would be Howardians. However, as God once whispered into Shakespeare’s ear, “That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”
I was raised in the Cumberland Presbyterian Church, studied Bible and religious education for two years at a small church-related college (not fundamentalistic), worked for over a year with religious education materials at the United Methodist Publishing House, became an Episcopalian and a member of Unity. I believe in the sacredness and unity of all.
Then why would He see the need to sacrifice His Son as our replacement? If everyone is going to heaven anyway, why bother?
Max
What love is and what love does are one and the same — the facilitation of goodness.
To be good and to do good are equivalent. When goodness is facilitated, love has happened. The whole purpose of love is to propogate goodness. Goodness is the aesthetic most valued by God.
Sin, on the other hand, is the obstruction of goodness. Sin is the opposite of love. When goodness is obstructed, sin has happened. The whole purpose of God’s sacrifice was to give man a means to defeat sin.
By becoming a man, living like a man, and dying like a man; by being born of God, living like God, and rising from the dead like God; by these did He eliminate all obstructions between Him and His creation. His desire is to pour out His goodness upon us, that is, to love us. We are saved by faith because our faith is our acceptance of His love.
To politicize Him into my-god-versus-your-god is not only to miss the point, but to obstruct the very goodness that He seeks to facilitate. It isn’t a matter of rah-rah my team can beat up your team. The division of men into Christians and Muslims and Jews is as arbitrary as the division of men into Negroes and Caucasians and Mongoloids. The labels of theist and atheist are relevant only to an intellectual taxonomy, and not to God’s purpose.
Jesus is not in competetion with Moses or Mohammed. There is no meaningful choice between Him and Buddha. It is not the words and sounds and labels that are to be worshipped, but the Living Being Who both is and does love.
A man is not a Christian in any meaningful sense just because he believes with his brain that by choosing Christ he is choosing the winning team. Rather, a man is a Christian in the manner Jesus describes as His disciple by making the free moral decision in his heart to love.
There are those who call Him lord, but wouldn’t know Him if they saw Him standing in front of their face. And there are those who know Him intimately while calling Him some other name. What loving people reject is not Christ Himself, but the caricature of Christ that religion politicians present to them.
And who can blame them? If a man refuses to worship that which is presented to him as a hater of fags or a political force or a vengeful deity who stands at the gates of hell hoping to trap those who wander too close, then he has refused rightly.
That which is Christ is not bound by a book or by a label or by a caricature. He is the Living Love, the Love Everlasting Whose name is I Am. He dwells in the hearts of those who love. A man who opens his heart to love is a man who has faith. A man who proclaims faith but closes his heart is bellowing empty sounds.
The man who proclaims, “I am an atheist,” but feeds the poor, visits those in prison, and helps those who are sick is closer to Christ than the man who proclaims, “I am a Christian,” but ignores the poor, looks down on criminals, and avoids those who are sick. A tree is known by its fruit. And a disicple of Christ is a person who loves.
But, suppose the villagers have a two percent literacy rate in their own language? Now they each hear only the interpretation of the Holy Scripture that fell from the sky, as delivered by that two in a hundred. And it is known that those books were not true scripture. How does this scenario differ from the world we live in? The book is not the Word. The Lord is the Word.
Even so, The Lord God shall save them. And he shall save the ones too stupid to understand the lessons of the teachers who can read.
How?
Didn’t the Lord already send them a teacher who was good, and kind and honest, and loving? Did that man not live among them, living a code that embodied the true word of God? Haven’t they already seen the Word of God? Those among them who seek to love are already saved. And of course, they are saved by the Love of God, as Lib mentioned.
However, the “Books Dropped on Your Head” ministry is not the only way that the Lord has of reaching these folks.
Tris
Exactly. To seek love is to seek God because God is love.
In Acts 16 we read the story of a jailer who was going to kill himself because he thought his prisoners had escaped. The penalty, under the Romans at that time, for letting prisoners escape was death.
27 And the keeper of the prison awaking out of his sleep, and seeing the prison doors open, he drew out his sword, and would have killed himself, supposing that the prisoners had been fled.
28 But Paul cried with a loud voice, saying, Do thyself no harm: for we are all here.
29 Then he called for a light, and sprang in, and came trembling, and fell down before Paul and Silas,
30 And brought them out, and said, Sirs, what must I do to be saved?
31 And they said,** Believe ** (there’s that word again) on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved, and thy house.
Note that Paul does not include the word love in his response.
P.S. Thanks for the assist Poly.
Looking for something else, I found this quote I had never seen before:
“Most people are bothered by those passages of Scripture they do not understand, but the passages that bother me are the ones I do understand.”
We have a real problem in the teachings of Jesus (as recorded in the Gospels) on the subject. Repentance and belief in God are reiterated any number of times. But then you have the Parable of the Two Sons, the Parable of the Sheep and Goats (perhaps the only occasion on which Jesus in his own teaching specifically addresses who will be saved and who not*), the reiterated Summary of the Law, that would lead us to believe that Jesus was teaching that a life lived in love of God and fellow man is what saves.
Think this through, and bring in some of what Paul has to say. They’re paradoxical – they seem contradictory, but they’re not.
If sin condemns, and no human being is perfect (two givens for the sake of this argument), then nobody can “earn” salvation. It’s given by grace – the free gift of God. You are not entitled to it, any more than anyone liking you and wishing to help you who gives you a helping hand is obliged to do so. It’s his or her choice to help you – and it’s God’s free choice to save whom He will – and He chooses to save everybody.
How you access this salvation is by trusting Him – by “believing” in Him not as the petty megalomaniac tyrant painted in several OPs here recently, but as the all-powerful and compassionate Creator and Father of all. To what extent this involves subscribing to dogmata about Him is a controverted question not worth going into here – IMHO it would involve not rejecting an idea alleged as a tenet of faith without exploring what it might mean, and having the intellectual humility to accept that what sounds bizarre to you might actually have a meaning worth subscribing to, to someone else who does believe it.
However, “be ye doers of the Word and not hearers only.” A person who accepts Jesus as Savior and Lord must in consequence follow His commandments, live a life characterized by love of God and fellow man, or he’s failing to mean anything by claiming Jesus as Lord – if He’s Lord of your life, that means you need to do what He says, or you’re falling short ("hamartizein – “sinning”) of truly making Him Lord in your heart.
However, and this is a big point to me, none of us is capable of either intellectually comprehending fully the totality of God or of living out the commands of Jesus fully (extreme example: “Be ye perfect as your Father in Heaven is perfect”) – and God knows this. Having taken the role of Father towards you, He is not interested in sitting in judgment over you so much as loving you, helping you to pick yourself up when you fall and keep on keeping on. He is more ready to forgive than we are to repent.
And, BTW, “repent” does not mean “give up some particular bunch of acts that some preacher claims are sins” – it means “turn away from trying to figure out what is going to benefit you the most and doing only that, and turning instead to Him and trusting Him to make your life fuller and richer, because He has promised He will.”
Playing dueling Scripture quotes on whether belief or love saves is a fool’s game at best – what saves is God’s grace freely given, and nothing else. Nothing we can do will save us. It’s doing both to the extent one can achieve them, plus God’s forgiveness of the inevitable shortcomings in what we do.
One more point: God’s justice and Hell. The assumption is that anyone who doesn’t “go to Heaven when he dies” “through no fault of his own” is evidence against God’s justice. Wrong. IMHO, flatworms are not entitled to “go to Heaven” – when they die, they are dead. Human beings are biological organisms, the result of an evolutionary process that started with something very like a flatworm. They’re no more entitled to Heaven than that flatworm is. God’s grace allows them access to it. What happens if they choose not to accept that grace? They die. And, because they are conscious, their consciousness survives the termination of life processes in a sort of hysteresis – one characterized by regret for what they failed to do and by virtual annihilation of the self, leaving only the “ash” of what was once a fire in their hearts. And that is Hell.
Nonsense! Everyone knows that Harold is the proper name of God the Father. His angels are even named after him:
Hark! The Harold angels sing…
As to the OP: None of the 5 villages is going to avoid burning in Hell for all eternity, because the missionary forgot to give them the Old Testament too. 
My mistake for not being clear.
I meant nowing Jesus as their savior , not just “knowing He is divine”.
You Know Jesus by knowing that we are all sinners, and He died to take the rap for our sins, as it were.
So you’re suggesting that consciousness is independent of the body? 
Why is that surprising to you? Do you know any Christians? Isn’t that a basic tenet of Christianity? That is: Life (and therefore consciousness) after death of the body?
All of them strive, with all the tools at their disposal, to live in a manner which is right, and to follow the example of a Christian.
By acknowledging that the missionary was a man who held the answer to eternal life, they have already acknowledged the power of God.
They do the best they can with what they have.
God is merciful and just, he will judge them kindly.
I think the formula for who gets into Heaven is kind of like the current admissions standards for the University of Michigan. People who are “Christians” get 20 extra points, but he still looks at your “academic” performance…
Congratulations, you win today’s ‘most obtuse diversion from topic’ award.
The OP asks us to assume the existence of heaven (even if only for the sake of coherent debate).
Thank you all for your input. Most helpful and enlightening.
For my part, I tend to view the Village D’ers (divinity, no ethics) as the most deprived. I see the divine elements as validating the moral and ethical teachings in the Bible (i.e. “Why should be do what Jesus said? Because he’s the Son of God.”)
The D’ers are told they only have to believe and are given no other guidance on how to live their lives. So long as you believe, you’re free to do whatever you want while here on Earth. What’s the point?
If I followed **Polycarp’s **post correctly, he suggests that the way we accept God’s grace is by following the moral code laid out in the Scriptures. The D villagers are deprived of that code.
On the other hand, in C the villagers have accepted without even knowing even being aware of what the “reward” is. Shouldn’t they get something extra?
Again, thanks for all your input.