I didn’t mean this literally, I just meant it as a hypothetical. If the answer is yes, it raises another question.
Say there was a non-Christian. They followed all Christian rules, (no murder, no theft, they loved, etc. Also, I know they couldn’t follow rules that say you have to accept Christ and things like that.) they live through their life doing everything like the most holy Christian possible. They just don’t believe in the Christian God.
Would Hitler confessing on his deathbed mean he had a better chance of getting to Heaven than a non-Christian who does good things?
Once again, the answer to this will depend on which denomination of Christianity you’re talking about, and even which Christian you are talking to. Many Christians believe that the only path to Heaven is through Jesus, because even a “very good person” will still sin.
The fact that any Christian would say Hitler has a better chance confuses me. Objectively, the non-Christian lived more like a holy Christian than Hitler did.
Also, please consider what others have already said about your Hitler question:
1: Cain’s wife presumably came from somewhere in the general vicinity of Eden. Even if you, for some odd reason, take the story of Genesis as literally true (which interpretation is only about 10% as old as Christianity, and an even smaller percentage of the time since Genesis was written), it just says that Adam and Eve were the first humans created. God could have created whole cities full of humans after then.
2: We don’t know. There are some schools of thought, in fact, that every human goes to Heaven. I don’t know about other sects, but this belief is entirely consistent with the Catholic Church’s teachings (the Church doesn’t actually teach universal salvation, but neither does it teach that universal salvation is wrong). There are some individuals whom the Church says are definitely, absolutely in Heaven (that’s what the Canon of Saints is, a list of those people known to be in Heaven), but there’s no human whom the Church says is definitely, absolutely in Hell.
3: OK, I’ve asked that, too. I dunno. But the truth, falsehood, sense, or nonsense of the Immaculate Conception has basically no impact on my life, so I pretty much just ignore it.
4: Christians believe that humans have free will. There’s no belief that it’s only us. The Bible explicitly allows for the possibility that animals have souls (and thus, presumably, free will to at least some degree), and certainly angels have souls.
5: God loves everyone, but humans don’t. Humans cause suffering and pain.
6: God wants us to choose to follow God. If we couldn’t choose otherwise, it wouldn’t be a choice at all.
Oh, yeah, that definitely happens. In some cases, it’s suspected that the “saint” never even existed, and was just a renaming of the old god or goddess (this might be the case for Brigid, for instance). And Mary certainly fills a lot of roles that were traditionally held by goddesses: Any time you hear “Our Lady of _____”, that’s Mary in one of those roles. It’s like in any other family: Mom ends up doing a lot of the work just because nobody else does.
Much appreciated.
Except that we all know that Hitler would never truly repent, so the hypothetical is similar to “If aliens really built the Pyramids…”.
Some denominations believe that those kinds of people go to their own idea of heaven.
The argument is that it is impossible to live a sinless life, and Jesus is the only being who can remove sin. And if you don’t get your sin removed, you can’t get into heaven.
Some will make allowances for someone who didn’t have a chance to accept him, saying that God gives them a chance in the afterlife. But rejecting Jesus is just seen as like rejecting life-saving medicine.
You can have a purgatory where that sin is removed over time, with the smaller sins taking lest time. You can give post-death time to accept the medicine. But just you can’t have sin in heaven.
Not my belief. But that’s the mythology.
And the Mormons even let you accept Jesus after you’ve died, when you come face to face with God. But… There’s a catch, you need to be baptized. Or have a live person get baptized for you. There are Mormons who get baptized over and over, to give everyone whose info they can find a chance to accept Jesus.
My best friend is an atheist agnostic, and in college in the early-mid 1990s in rural Texas it was hilarious when he’d get into discussions about religion, and he’d bring this very point up and watch them flounder.
His argument was basically that incompetent missionaries are damning people to Hell right and left because now they’d heard the Word of God and rejected it because the missionaries were the usual rural unenlightened dipshits like them, and had ineffectively preached to these people.
The God-botherers would usually flounder and get consternated. Every now and then one would say something that stank of predestination, like “if it was meant to be, God would have made them more competent” or something absurd like that, and he’d light them up on that too.
Even as a Christian, it was enjoyable to see him dismantle their stupid arguments. I’ve always been one who thinks that if you’re going to believe something, you need to understand it, not just parrot the party line.
Here’s another question I’ve pondered.
We’re told that God cast Adam and Eve out of Eden because they had sinned. Then, some time later, God sent/manifested as Jesus to offer the opportunity of redemption to people.
My question is why was there this interval? God’s omniscient and exists outside of time. So God must have known at the moment that he was punishing Adam and Eve that he was going to send/appear as Jesus. So why not do it right then? If God had given out that message of redemption right at the beginning, then there wouldn’t have been any issue of people not knowing about it.
That is not in the bible, nor is omnipotent.
It may not be based on scripture but I feel most Christians believe God is omniscient and omnipotent.
I hope this isn’t a derail but the actual existence of a benevolent afterlife aside, I always thought it was weird how people use the “Hitler sincerely repents and goes to Heaven” idea in and of itself as some kind of gotcha against Christianity. I can understand thinking it’s dumb that you need to believe certain things to avoid eternal torment or that a bad person can repent and avoid eternal torment while good people get eternal torment for any number of acts and beliefs that clearly don’t deserve it.
This could be its own thread but my question to those who aren’t basing their outrage at Hitler repenting and going to Heaven on the two reasons I just mentioned would be “What would you prefer happen to evil people after death then?” There are Christian Universalists that think everyone goes to Heaven right away or after being corrected in a purgatory like state. There are also Christians that think evil people simply cease to exist after death. I don’t adhere to any organized religion but I think every single person going to a benevolent afterlife right away and the evil people having their evil natures changed makes the most sense if there truly was a omnieverything God. No one could possibly deserve eternal punishment for finite crimes, basic desert doesn’t make sense in light of a deterministic/indeterministic universe and why would you subject someone to any kind of unpleasant corrective process if it could be done harmlessly and instantly?
What’s the deal with people who say they are true Christians and who believe that they can be redeemed as long as they believe in Jesus and repent. And then say they’re therefore going to go ahead and commit some sinful acts now because they have the option of being forgiven in the future.
Is there a theological term for this? And what’s the Christian view on it?
It’s called Antinomianism:
tl; dr - Spoiler alert: Generally considered a heresy.
Yup, by doing that, you’re not accepting Jesus’s salvation.
I don’t feel that antinomianism is quite what I’m talking about. That view seems to exist without a time element. It seems to be asserting that as long as you’ve accepted Jesus, you’re immune to any secular legal concerns (as far as religion goes).
The idea I’m talking about has an explicit time element attached. It’s acknowledging that there are religious consequences for committing illegal acts - but it argues that there is a means of negating those consequences so you’re free to commit the acts now an anticipation of future negation.
A prime example of this is Constantine I. He was a Roman Emperor who promoted Christianity. He himself was baptized as a Christian - but he waited until he was dying to do so. His stated reasoning was that he would have to commit immoral and sinful acts as Emperor but his baptism would erase all of these and restore him as an innocent. So he wanted to be able to spend his life committing sins but then have his record expunged as he was facing the afterlife.
I suspect that there are far fewer people like that, than there are Christians who sin regularly, believing that they will go to heaven anyway, because they have already accepted Jesus.
“Jesus died for our sins…so let’s make sure he didn’t die in vain!”