According to the Bible, it appears that the path to salvation (i.e., Heaven) is to believe in God and love Him with all your heart, mind, and soul. Is this the only path, though? How much of a role do actions play in the mix? Are people condemned to Hell because of their lack of belief, even if they are never given the chance to believe?
Personally, I think that there are other ways into Heaven, besides having a belief in God. I view God as a loving Father type, and as such I have a hard time believing that He could send an otherwise decent human being to Hell, just because they didn’t believe He exists (or that Jesus died on the cross for everyone’s sins).
What are everyone else’s views on this?
LilShieste
No, belief in Jesus is the only path to salvation. That’s even more specific than belief in God. God in a sense IS salvation, the Father that Christ brings one to.
What about a person who is born in a hut in the forest, unaware of the existence of the rest of society; what if they are never taught about God and Jesus? Why punish them for something they had no control over?
LilShieste
People are trying to tone this down but this is my understanding of what christianity teaches. Seems like they are just trying to turn a sows ear into a silk purse.
My personal stance on that matter is…
God makes himself known in everyone’s hearts (scriptural evidence but not sure exactly where). However, just because they know God in there heart does not mean they know God intellectually. What I mean by this is, every human even the ones living under rainforest trees or mudhuts have some concept of a supreme being. They don’t have the knowledge of Jesus or the God of the Bible but they do recognize a supreme being. This recognition I believe is the part of God that he placed in everyone’s heart at the beginning of creation.
The way I figure this is the Bible says that God is love. Children everywhere are born good, they love. Even the people who have never heard of a Christian God or Jesus, they know what love is, they understand the wonders of creation. These people who are secluded from modern civilization or are not familiar with Christianity, lets say the ones that pray to the “rain” or to “harvest” or to “trees”… they know they are supposed to worship and pray and to be good and to love…and these people do so to the best of their ability. They feel God in there hearts, they may not know it’s God, they may not realize that the tree, the rain, the harvest, the earth, and love are all from God and are part of him but they do their best with the rationalization they have, and in my opinion God would understand that and will reward them.
That’s how it was presented to me, as well. That’s what lead to this question, though. I’m having trouble reconciling that answer with the idea that God is a loving God.
LilShieste
So from day one a child knows what love is, and is naturally good? Why do they need to be taught right from wrong, then? Why do some children behave wickedly and hateful if they start out full of goodness and love? How can it be that a being full of the goodness and love of God can ever turn evil?
OK. But the OP is asking about doctrinal teachings of the christian churches. I doubt he was asking for people to come in and testify as to their personal beliefs. If that is what you were taught then what is the scriptural basis?
The concept of original sin isn’t explicitly laid out in the Bible. It’s not inconceivable to rationalize that a person who lived their entire life outside of society would have had no opportunity to sin. This person would, theoretically, therefore not need Christ’s salvation in order to redeem their souls from the sins they’d blackened it with.
I don’t know of any Christian Churches actually teach this doctrine: it’s not very relevant for anyone who actually would come in contact with a religion.
If original sin is based on the sins of adam and eve and is visited on their descendants why would their descendants who had never heard of christ be excluded from guilt? Sounds like rationalization to me.
The acceptance of the gift of salvation from Jesus Christ as offered and paid for by his crucifiction is the only known path to salvation.
HOWEVER…
There are some parts of the Bible that indicate that their might be other paths (e.g. “My Father’s house has many rooms” translation variants). This is the source of much debate, and makes Bible study in a good church an absolute blast. It helps if you follow a belief system where you can regularly debate the meaning of a word (and accept the fact that the Bible was written down by people at a certain time in a certain culture, and that we are still working on interpreting some of the idioms to this day).
C.S.Lewis alludes to this concept of salvation by other faiths in the final Narnia book, when a worshipper of the other God finds himself in Narnia Heaven. Aslan informs him that all good deeds done in the bad God’s name were really deeds done in Aslan’s name. As Lewis was a top Christian philosopher, you will find that he is studied regularly in churches across the U.S. This concept of his is not an unknown one, though you will not find it taught from the pulpit as much as discussed in Bible study.
IIRC, according to Mormon belief (which is as Christian as anybody’s), to get into the highest level of heaven you have to not only accept Christ, but also get several rituals done that are only provided by the LDS church. Also your deeds in life matter and you are judged by them, so you have to try to keep those sin levels down.
This is to get into the highest level of heaven. There are supposedly several progressively lower levels of “heaven”, all of which are supposed to be pretty nice, even the one for cumpulsive liars, heretics, witches, scumbags, atheists: those sorts of people. Somebody who supposedly saw the lowest level of heaven back in the 1830s reported that the glory of it “surpasses all understanding”. Which I took to mean simply that, yes, they will indeed have toilet paper there.
The works come from living in the spirit, not in the flesh. You won’t be able to do "Godly’ works in the flesh, is it not possible. Belief gets you the Holy Spirit.
This, again, is exactly how I was taught, and runs exactly counter to many of the interpretations in the linked thread. It causes me to wonder how anyone can know what to believe, if current dogma can diametrically oppose past dogma.
Actually, that statement, while a wide assortment of Christians would make it in confident assertion that it’s what God said in the Bible, is not quite right.
Paul is pretty explicit on the subject: People are saved, if at all, by the grace of God – i.e., as an unearned gift from Him, not in consequence of anything they do, whether it’s be amazingly nice or believe extra super-duper hard.
One receives this grace individually by trusting Him, i.e., by putting one’s faith in Him. One is then, it would appear from Jesus’s teaching as presented in the Gospels and James’s expansion on Paul’s doctrine, expected to show that one has in fact decided to trust God and follow Him by a life characterized by the love of God and one’s fellow man, humility, the following of the Golden Rule, generosity, compassion, forgiveness, etc.
My own understanding of how this might be: In point of fact, this doctrine, which smacks of the worst of Jonathan Edwards Calvinism, is pretty much in accord with natural science. There is absolutely nothing known to man outside religious doctrine which would lead a reasonably skeptical person to think that any part of the human persona outlives the death of the body. This would be in accord with the fact that all lower life forms appear to die dead all over.
Ergo, if there is such a thing as eternal or everlasting life, it must be something added on to the normal mortal nature of humanity. Just as material typed and saved in RAM is lost when the computer suffers a fatal error and crashes, the personality is lost when the wetware suffers a fatal error and crashes permanently. But if the User saves to durable media, it may be preserved beyond the crash of the wetware.
