People who haven't heard of Jesus

Great Debates
1

Many literalist Christians have told me that, even though Hell awaits those who do not beleive in Jesus, if you have never heard of Jesus, then after death you’re judged on whether you’re a good person, rather than whether you’ve embraced Jesus, and you can still get into heaven. Is there any biblical support for that idea?

Let me just say, this cheeses me off a bit. I’m pretty sure I’d squeak in as a Virtuous Pagan. I pay my taxes and return lost wallets and refrain from kicking puppies–but noooo, because I have heard the Good News, it’s fire and brimstone for me, yes sirree.

Or, maybe I’m wrong. Would I still have to have followed Christian morality? (If that’s the case, case, the adultery and fornication thing woulda bit me in the butt bigtime. :slight_smile: ) Or, since the Virtuous Pagans didn’t hear Jesus’ message, are they judged by Jesus’ standards? If that’s so, then by what standards would they be judged?

If I understand correctly, if we accept Jesus, He forgives our sins; that’s why He is the key to salvation. I just don’t get why the sins of people who have never learned about Jesus would be forgiven anyway–if they had heard the Gospel, they might have rejected Him anyway. Or does God know who would have accepted Him and who wouldn’t? (Yay, predestination!) Or do they get to have a post-deathbead conversion?

I’ll admit up front that I’ve always considered this “go to heaven for being a good person if you haven’t learned about Jesus” thing a cop-out by literalist Christians so that they do not have to accede to the monstrous unfairness of condemning all non-Christians to Hell, but maybe I’ve just never heard the whole story.

(If your sect doesn’t believe that non-beleivers who have heard the World automatically go to Hell, Mazal Tov, but I’m interested in the literalist point of view.)

2

Why?

I don’t get it. (There has been a huge flood of “Christian belief is stupid” threads lately, and I don’t get any of them.) If you aren’t a Christian, Christian beliefs about “Hell” shouldn’t be of any relevance to you. I don’t get upset about what Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Sikhs, or two billion or so Christians say about their relationship with God, because they ain’t me.

3

The literalist Christians that I’ve talked to say that all non-Christians are going to hell. Being born in the midle of Mongolia is no excuse - off to hell you go. Let’s say you were born before Jesus existed, tough.

4

The tolerant literalist Christians I’ve talked to say that if you lived your entire life without ever hearing of Jesus, then God will judge you based on your behavior in life.

However, if someone were to come up to you one day and yell “JESUS!”, then it is your duty to accept him as your lord and savior and all-around great guy, or get tossed into the flames of dammnation. Hey, you were exposed, and you turned away, tough noogies.

5

Podkayne asked:

This is a tangent, but there is support in the Koran for this. I don’t have my copy handy, but it basically comes out and say that if you haven’t received a “messenger” (read: prophet) and you die without believing, then your fate will be decided upon at a later date. But if you have gotten the “warning” and choose to disregard it, you’re screwed. Off to Hell with you.

I couldn’t tell you about the Bible, though.

6

It cheeses him off because he’s going to hell, and yet he wouldn’t be if he had never heard the Word. (The reason that it only cheeses him off a bit instead of a lot is because he doesn’t take it seriously.)

–Cliffy

7

It’s always bothered me too. Consider if you will two missionaries who are sent to two different remote tribes in the jungles of South America. These tribes are so isolated that they have never heard of Jesus. The first missionary has the gift of gab and is a brilliant speaker. He wows them in his villiage and convinces every single one of them that Jesus is the one true God. He is so charasmatic that they all remember him for years. They build a church and live pious Christain lives. Every one of them gets into Heaven.

The second missionary though devout is a lousy speaker and debater. His sermons are technically correct but he is boring and he loses the interest of the natives. They’re good people and listen to him politely, feed him and send him on his way. Not a single one of them becomes a Believer. When they die, they find themselves in Hell.

Had the second missionary never contacted the natives, they would be judged on their deeds and would easily have made it into Heaven. It’s only because he did such a crappy sell job that they were doomed. It is therefore possible for a missionary to send more people to Hell than to Heaven.

It’s precisely that sort of logical inconsistency that just won’t allow me to believe in the Christian concept of an afterlife.

Haj

8

If I might offer my ever so humble opinion on the matter.

The teachings of Christianity for the most part come out of the New Testament. The overriding message of the New Testament is love. Jesus states that the most important thing is to love your neighbors and such. Jesus states that only those who know him and who he knows will get into heaven. He states things like if you clothe and feed the man in need then you also clothe and feed him, and he will recognize you later on. Basically, your deeds show what is in your heart.

To put it bluntly, what I have concluded is that if you truly love your fellow man then you know and have accepted Jesus in your heart be default, whether or not you have explicitly done so. So therefore you get into heaven.

Basically, if you do things out of a fear of hell then you aren’t doing things for the right reasons…they are essentially still selfish reasons and they are no help to you. You should be doing things because you WANT to do them because you love and respect your fellow man.

That’s my personal take on it. Take it or leave it.

9

There is a logical problem here too. Where do you draw the line? Some one who is loving all of the time, all of the time except for a couple of minor slip ups, most of the time, more often than not…? The line has to be drawn somewhere. The difference between someone who barely makes it in and one who barely doesn’t make it would have to be so infinitesimally small as to be indistinguishable. This is an analog approach to who gets in.

The belief or not belief model is a digital approach. It’s much cleaner and the difference between who gets in and who doesn’t is clear. Still, as I illustrated above, it also makes little sense.

I think it was CS Lewis who talked about a stratified Heaven. The better a person you were the better the Heaven you got. The best Christians get to live in the best neighborhoods with the best weather so to speak. This makes the most sense of all and the guy who was never told about Jesus would still get a nice house with a two car garage but no swimming pool or some such.

Personally, I find the whole idea of an afterlife to be silly. Depending on who you believe, I could be in for some bad times.

Haj

10

No, I’m not sure I agree with your line drawing thing there haj. I think if you have love then you have love. It’s a clean line. You can slip up and get angry and such, but that doesn’t mean you don’t love them. Think about your children, siblings, parents, spouse, etc. Sometimes you get angry with them but still love them. Same applies with my idea.

11

Are you born with love or do you have to develop it? Are some predestined to Hell just because they were born without love? What about someone who was never shown love and never developed the capacity to love?

Haj

12

You aren’t born with love, you must develop it. And repeating that the Word of God is essentially love, then if one is never shown love then one has never has truly heard the Word of God and so cannot be found at fault.

13

I, too have wondered what does happen to the souls of those who never hear the Good News? Do they get eternal torture? Or do they just waltz right in with a free pass; while the rest of us have to satisfy very stringent requirements to get to heaven?

Either way, the injustice of this is too obvious to discuss.

14

This is a passage that I have always found helpful in trying to understand God’s attitude to those who do not know him (bolding mine)…

1 John 4

Gp

15

In the Catholic church, if you haven’t been baptised you go to purgatory, not heaven or hell, so the problem resolves itself.

16

grimpixie’s post is pretty much what I was talking about, if you need Biblical cites.

17

Thank you all for your responses.

RickJay, like Cliffy sez, I chose the term “cheesed off” rather than “deeply troubled” or “profoundly disturbed” or “infuriated” because I’m just sayin’, it doesn’t seem fair. . . (BTW, Cliffy, I’m female.)

I find the notion of Heaven and Hell, to be perfectly honest, kinda juvenile. If I take the preposterous notion of the afterlife that’s peddled by the Evangelicals for granted, just for laffs, then I am left with two even more preposterous potions: either God would let billions of people who’ve never heard of His Son go to Hell, or else God has a seperate set of standards for judging those who haven’t heard of Jesus–and, even though I might have made it to Heaven under that set, I lost whatever chance I had for salvation when my mother taught me to sing “Yes, Jesus Loves Me.”

I’m not upset about it; I’m interested in it–it’s a fascinating dilemma, and I’d like to know how it is solved by those who do take it seriously. I find myself in a Christian society, and url=“http://www.gallup.com/poll/releases/pr010413.asp”]45% of Americans consider themselves Evangelical. I’d say that the beliefs shared by roughly half of the population around me should be of some interest to me, whether I think they’re valid or not.

I just asked out of intellectual curiousity–like I said, this has never made a lot of sense to me, and I was wondering if someone could come along and say, “This belief is based on this passage in scripture or this theological argument.” You know, fighting ignorance, and all that.

Sorry if my inquiry cheeses you off. :wink:

And thanks to all who have shared their thoughts. Neurotik and grimpixie, the quote is certainly apropos, but that is obviously not what Born-Agains think, since they say that the only way to go to Heaven is to be baptised in the name of Jesus–that’s the perspective I’m trying to understand.

18

It is my feeling that the kind of Christians that you call “Born-Agains” (a term that I don’t particularly like - see later) do not like things to be unclear or fuzzy at all. If there is a right and a wrong, then you can feel safe when you are on the “right” side of the fence. This is why many of these Christians come across as rather arrogant - it is just that they are certain that they are right and safely in heaven and you are wrong and about to burn. A very comfortable position to be in!!

As far as “Born-Again”, it falls into the same category as “Fundamentalist” - I consider myself to be both born again (as in John 3)and fundamentalist (as in "there are fundamental elements to my faith that I will not compromise), but I am neither a Born Again Christian nor a Fundamentalist, as both of those labels hav come to be applied to a certain branch of the Protestant Church who are fairly conservative, literalist and loud in their noise-making. Not like me at all…

Gp

19

grimpixie, I tend to agree with what you’ve said. I sympathise quite a bit with that black-and-white point of view. If I were of a religious bent, that’s what I would expect from my god–a clear list of what I can do and what I can’t do, and how I’m supposed to get into Heaven. I don’t care if it’s hard to do, just as long as God makes sure I know what do to. As is easily demonstrated with this issue, as well as others, such a clear outline of acceptible behaviour is not easily gleaned from any holy book, but I can completely understand why the biblical literalists are trying.

I am sorry if any of the terms I used offended you. I’ve thrown around “biblical literalist”, “Evangelical”, “Born-Again,” and you introduced “Fundamentalist”, but I’ve tried to make it as clear as possible that the point-of-view I’m curious about is the belief that (once you’ve heard the Gospel) the only way to get to Heaven is to accept Jesus, and thus to be forgiven for all of your sin. If there’s a good specific word to characterize people who believe that, please let me know.

20

C.S. Lewis has a neat solution for this in The Last Battle, the Narnia version of St. John’s Revelation. After the end of the world, a Calormen soldier (the Calormen are vaguely Middle Eastern baddies) encounters Aslan, the lion who is an analogue of Jesus. The soldier says that he has has followed Tash (an evil spirit worshipped as a god by the Calormen)all of his life and he is surprised to be greeted by Aslan, who he had been taught to fear. Aslan says that no good deed would ever be accepted by Tash, and no bad deed would ever be accepted by Aslan. All the good deeds that the soldier had unwittingly done in the name of Tash were accounted as service to Aslan, so the soldier gets to go to heaven.