People who haven't heard of Jesus

Great Debates
61

Just stumbled onto this thread now, but I thought I might be able to clarify at least what the basii (basises? bases?) for various beliefs are from Biblical texts. The ones already presented were very good, but I have a few to add. The following is in support of the idea that Christ is the only way to Heaven:

Matthew 11:27 “All things are deivered unto me of my Father: and no man knoweth the Son, but the Father; neither knoweth any man the Father, save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son will reveal him;”

John 20:31 “But these are written, that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing ye might have life through his name.”

John 3:5-6 “Jesus answered, ‘Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is Spirit.’”

John 3:14-16 “And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up: That whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life. For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life.”

An important point about sin and faith is presented here as well:

Romans 3:23-4 “For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God; Being justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus:”

Romans 3:27-8 “Where is boasting then? It is excluded. By what law? of works? Nay, but by the law of faith. Therefore we conclude that a man is justified by faith without the deeds of the law.”

While this seems to preclude the idea that doing good things is what gets you into Heaven, I would draw a distinction between doing good things and being a good person. Paul also mentions elsewhere that faith without works is dead; i.e., as I think someone mentioned, you show that you have faith by doing what a person that has faith would, or should, do. (Although even that begs the question: if I have faith, then I’m supposed to do what I would do?) Maybe it would just be easier to say, a person who has faith should do what we generally accept to be God’s will for us to do, and thus a person shows he has faith by practicing it.

In support of the idea that what you know does matter:

Matthew 11:21-24: “Woe unto thee, Chorazin! woe unto thee, Bethsaida! for if the mighty works, which were done in you, had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes. But I say unto you, It shall be more tolerable for Tyre and Sidon at the day of judgment, that for you.”

That really says a lot, IMO: while it not only implies that what you know matters, that also seems to imply that God could have done something more to save Tyre and Sidon–in effect, while that doesn’t necessarily make God responsible for their destruction (they may have had free will to obey/disobey and chosen to disobey), it’s possible that God could have made their salvation happen (without violating free will) if He’d chosen to.

This quote was already mentioned, but it seems to point out that the state of a person’s heart, and not his knowledge of God’s law, is what determines his salvation:

Romans 2:14-15 “For when the Gentiles, which have not the law, do by nature the things contained in the law, these, having not the law, are a law unto themselves: Which show the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness, and their thoughts the mean while accusing or else excusing one another; )”

I think this would also work well with the “Jesus is love” argument mentioned before: only by knowing/believing/having faith in Jesus can one be saved, and one may know Jesus in having a good heart even if one does not know Him by name, so it is thus possible for those who don’t know Jesus by name to be saved. One issue some might take with this, however, is that it seems arbitrary: some people “by nature” obey the law, and others don’t… but it’s not clearly explained how this would fit into the model of free will, which other parts of the Bible seem to suggest that salvation is clearly contingent on.

(BTW, just for argument, the book of James is sometimes construed to be disagreeing with the “faith-only” basis of salvation; this quote might represent that: James 1:26-27 “If any man among you seem to be religious, and bridleth not his tongue, but deceiveth his own heart, this man’s religion is vain. Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world.”)

I thought I’d add that I personally don’t accept the idea of a stratified Heaven or hell, since it came up earlier. As I see it, while Heaven and hell may seem like reward and retribution, respectively, those are not their actual purpose but just ancillary benefits: Heaven is the place where those that obey God belong, and thus believers are taken there because they belong there, not because God is trying to bribe them (although there are texts one could quote which seem to suggest otherwise; however, I think these can be dealt with in the context of the entire Gospel message). Heaven is where God is and where those justified to Him belong; it’s merely a perk that, yeah, it’s full of pleasure that lasts for eternity (this idea is supported by Biblical reference as well). Hell, on the other hand, is where those who by their choice of sin have decided to reject God belong: away from Him. I don’t believe in the eternal-suffering hell of some preacher’s imaginations, but that hell is the sinful world that exists today and which God will eliminate post-judgment.

As for who will make it where, here’s something to think about: to be un-justified, one must be sinful. Parts of the Bible suggest that sin is the legacy of humanity and that every human is born into it, but I find an inconsistency in that because Jesus Christ is stated to have lived a life without sin, and yet to have been born of a human being. This fits with what I think is a better definition of sin: the willful disobedience of God (or the willful decision to do that which you know is wrong, if not in the context of theology). If you accept this, that leads to an interesting problem: what happens, not just to people who don’t know Christ, but to babies who die moments after birth? Since they never had the opportunity to do anything, they can’t be considered righteous (since righteousness, I think, requires willful activity), but they can’t be sinners either since they never had the opportunity to sin. They would be blameless, and as such, don’t deserve to be separated from God, right?

But does that mean that anyone who died without having the opportunity to sin should go to Heaven, since it’s certainly plausible that a substantial number of those children would not only have been sinners but have been unrepentant ones if they’d lived? In other words, does dying before you have the opportunity to sin award you a “Get into Heaven free” card? And if so, wouldn’t that seem to suggest that the best thing we could possibly do for those about to enter the world is to kill them the moment they do, thereby guaranteeing them eternal bliss?

Anyway, it’s complicated (and I’m sure there’s a lot of points that I missed), but even answering the simplest parts of these questions creates many more.

62

I cannot believe that I finally whooooshed Tracer! :slight_smile: Friend, that third paragraph was using the name and life of Fr. Mychal Judge, OFM as an extended metaphor of God’s work in and through the world. (Thanks to Michie over on the Pizza Parlor for the eulogy column on him that sparked that line of thought.)

Philote, a good line of argument, but it avoids several pitfalls.

First, how can one be sure that the Bible, or a given Bible passage, is something one ought to give credence to? For us Christians, it’s more or less something that comes with the territory. But it ought to be obvious that God validates the Bible, not the other way around. Hence if you are seeking to make a case for what God expects, or if He exists, citing the Bible becomes circular reasoning. You’re attempting to prove Who He is and what He wants by a book that presupposes what you’re out to prove.

Second, please note that the complete justification-by-faith argument is founded in Paul’s letters. It’s his theory. And, ignoring James, there are two strong points to dispute it:

It’s God’s grace that anyone is saved, according to Paul himself; you buy into this grace through having faith in Him.

Second, Jesus is quite explicit that the doing of God’s will is the key point. Consider the parable of the Two Sons (not the prodigal son story, the other one) or “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ but he who does the will of the Father.”

The view I hold of this whole complexus is that one humbly recognizes that it’s God who is the initiating force in salvation, not anything whatsoever that a human being does (whether faith, good works, praying the sinner’s prayer, being baptized, being born again, or whatever), that one receives this grace through placing one’s trust in God’s goodness (faith), and that in taking Him as Lord of one’s life, one is moved to do His will, resulting in good works. Skipping any step in that sequence results in error. Your thoughts?

63

Good point, and actually, I’m not sure that you can. I take the existence of God here to be a given for the sake of argument; you’re right in that except for empirical evidence presented in the Bible (which I wouldn’t call conclusive), the Bible can’t be used to prove the existence of God.

But if you grant that God does exist, you still have the problem of whether or not the Bible is actually His inspired word, and if it is, how much of it is? Anything you intend to hold out as “God’s express will” of course requires argument; but for the sake of this discussion (and owing as well to my lack of knowledge in the area) I neglected to try and justify why you or I should accept certain parts of the Bible as true. The result is that the argument I gave assumes that each part of the Bible is equally correct, and I attempt to extrapolate an argument from there; but you’re right in that it may be that not all parts of the Bible, or even not any of it, are God’s actual will. There’s also the problem of apparent contradictions in the Bible and problems in translation that frequently pop up, all of which cast some doubt on the accuracy of whichever Bible it is we’re going out of (I used KJV for simplicity, because my Concordance is in the back of my KJV Bible :)), and all of these problems complicate what we’re trying to do here.

So on to the second point you mentioned:

I’m not entirely sure I disagree with you; in fact, it’s true that when I look to support my argument for justification by faith, I do rush straight to Paul’s letters (Romans in particular). (And I just wanted to kick in, in light of what I discussed above, that some of Paul’s ideas are ones that I have a particular trouble accepting… this tends to lead me toward the idea that the Bible is not, in its entirety, solely the word of God; I haven’t convinced myself of that necessarily, but there’s definitely some things I don’t agree with Paul about.) But while Paul definitely supports the idea of justification by faith, I’m not sure I agree that that’s the only place it appears. Consider John 3:14-16 quoted above:

“And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up: That whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life. For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life.”

While it’s true that qualifications are added to that later, I’m of the opinion that good works are supposed to be the result of having faith, but not the saving factor in themselves. I guess I could draw an analogy to a flashlight: to see in the darkness, you have to have a flashlight. But for the flashlight to work, you need batteries. So it’s pretty safe to assume that if you have light in the darkness, you must have both a flashlight and batteries. This parallels faith and works; the flashlight is faith, which is the vehicle through which light (or salvation) is produced, but the flashlight won’t produce light without batteries, much the same way as salvation can’t be attained without faith and works. (Hence, “faith without works is dead.”)

Um… actually, that analogy may not work too swiftly after all. It seems to lend a causality to works that I’m not trying to support… What I’m trying to say is that works are the evidence of faith, not the substance of it or of salvation; faith in Christ is the only thing that saves you, and the only thing that can (more on that below), but if faith is true then works presumably will follow necessarily.

The reason I say faith is the only thing that can save you is because of my particular belief about the need for salvation. I’ll give it in a nutshell: imagine a “great controversy” (those familiar with Seventh-day Adventist doctrine should recognize the phrase) between God and Satan, where Satan claims that God is unfair and that His law is unlivable, and as proof, points to sinful humanity; Romans tells us that all have sinned, and so Satan says to God, “Look, your rule is unfair, because no one can honestly be expected to follow it!”

God disagrees; His Son is sent to be born and die as a human being, and does so without sin. God thus turns to Satan and says, “See, it can be done!” Since Jesus is a man as well as the Son of God, His life without sin and death as a sacrifice (penance for sin) is the vehicle through which mankind is potentially redeemed. The one remaining step is for all people individually to choose to let that sacrifice represent them; they choose to let Jesus’s sacrifice take the place of their own, and only by doing so do they become acceptable to God. They accept through faith in and willfully accepting the sacrifice of Christ (both parts are key, because one cannot accept something one does not believe in, but belief in the existence of something does not constitute acceptance of it: the Gospel says that even the devils know God). Thus, justification by faith; nothing you do aside from accepting Christ’s sacrifice can remove the guilt of sin from you, so works must therefore be excluded as the method of salvation.

John 1:9-13 “That was the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world. He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not. He came unto his own, and his own received him not. But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name: which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.”

As far as the “great controversy” idea goes, I’m not sure if that’s entirely Adventist belief (and one of my favorite Adventist beliefs, since I think it puts everything into a sensible perspective) or if there’s Biblical support for it, but I do think that it’s the faith that counts, though that faith will necessarily be accompanied by works if it’s true. The works themselves, however, are as I see it not the prerequisite factor for salvation. What do you think?

64

If the works follow necessarily faith, what’s the point in saying “faith without works is dead”, since there can’t be faith without works, according to your theory?
Also : an innocent eye considering the sentence would immediatly think : well…it means that both faith and works are required. Why is it necessary to make so much efforts to interpret this quote instead of accepting it as its face value and with its more obvious meaning?

I can perceive only two explanations :

1)One has preconceived notions of what is required and try to conciliate the scriptures with his opinions instead of changing his opinions according to the content of the scriptures

2)There are actually other parts of the scriptures which contradict this one. So, someone giving more credit to these other parts of the scripture will try to conciliate this one with the others. But it means of course that someone else could have a different opinion (giving more credit to that sentence than to some other quote). Hence that nobody can know for sure who will be saved and who won’t be.

And of course, it raises the obvious question : why would be a god-inspired text be written in such a way that different people can so easily understand it in a different way and why this text would contain sentences which must be interpreted with complicated reasonning instead of being easy to understand immediatly for the reader taking them at their face value and reading them litterally.

And if you say that this difficulty to understand the meaning of the scriptures comes from the fact that all their content probably isn’t completely god-inspired, how can you know for sure that what part is god-inspired and what part isn’t? It would seem that there’s no way you can know, hence no way you can be sure that you’ll be saved.
And actually, if you have doubts about a part of them, on what do you base your doubts? You can’t base them on the scriptures themselves since you don’t know what part is inspired and what part is not. It would be circular thinking. So, you must consider that the parts you don’t agree with, based only on your faillible human opinions, are the non-inspired parts. Doing that, you gives yourself the role of a prophet. You assume that you are yourself inspired by god since you’re able to know what god’s will is.

And of course, you must consider seriously the possibility that no part at all is inspired as soon as you consider that a part isn’t.

65

The bible says alot of things. I don’t think many people around this place are open-minded enough to accept what anyone else says, so why bother trying to explain your interpretation of the bible? It is a futile effort.

66

But…then who created God? It just seems to me this is an argument for using God to justify our ignorance at any given moment. At one time, we didn’t know how the sun and moon moved across the skies and so we created gods for that. Then we understood that, but we still didn’t know how the earth and universe and higher life forms came to be so we created a god for that. Now, we understand those things (well, scientists do, although admittedly not everyone admits to the latter), so we have God to explain the Big Bang itself or the original very beginning of life itself. Admittedly, there is always a place for God because there is always something we are still ignorant of, but the room for God as an explanatory feature seems to get smaller and smaller.

It seems to me much better to just say that you accept God on faith than to try to justify God by our current state of ignorance.

67

Polycarp wrote:

Until 30 seconds ago, I’d never heard of Mychal Judge, OFM. I don’t pay much attention to the news. (Heck, on the morning of Sept. 11, I didn’t even hear about the terrorist attacks until I arrived at work at around 10:30 AM Pacific Time, 5 hours after the first plane crashed.)

68

I disagree. The more we know, the more we realize how little we know. I think that there will always be plenty of real estate for God to occupy . . . but it does seem odd that He changes addresses with every major scientific discovery. :wink:

69

No, Podkayne, our limited and often superstitious impressions of Him change as we eliminate supposed “divine acts” from the shopping list, but His reality never changes. Important distinction: what you or I or anyone else conceives of God as, is not God Himself.

70

Winky smilie, Poly.

Some people have a more sophisticated notion of the nature of God than others.