Reasons not to be allowed to enter Heaven

Great Debates
1

I’m not really sure how to approach this for two reasons. One is that I don’t have all the examples to hand that I am going to refer to and secondly because I know how hotly debated religious issues can be.

But I shall plough on nevertheless :rolleyes:

I read an article on the internet, which I would love to link to but two hours of googling has proved fruitless, which gave a list of people and their circumstances and asked the reader if they thought whether a Christian God would allow them to enter the Kingdom Of Heaven. IIRC there was about 10 of these situations. I’m hoping that someone on the SDMB will have come across this list before and be able to supply a link for me.

The two that stick most in my mind were

  1. An unborn baby or new-born infant

  2. A lady who for some reason had found God as a child, lost Him/Her in her teens, re-found Him/Her in her early twenties and went on to live a long and pious life until her eighties when in a moment of grief, caused by the loss of her husband, briefly rejected Him/Her before returning to Him/Her

All of the situations were very ‘loaded’ and I have tried here, lacking the original material, to remove the emotional loading. However they were not unbelievable scenarios.

For all of the situations, including the two above, the answer was ‘No’. The reasons given were that in the first instance, the unborn child / new-born infant had not been able to ‘find’ God in so much as either they were not baptised or that their brains were insufficiently developed to accept the concept of God and therefore could not let Him/Her into their hearts.

The reason in the second instance was that once God has accepted you back into His/Her fold, should you leave again there is no returning.

My question is – how true are the reasons given?

I have no strong religious beliefs either way and I realise that the article that I am quoting from was written in a provocative ‘How can God be just if he lets this go on’ style but it raises questions for me that I would like answered if possible.

My apologies in advance for not being able to locate a cite for this article and again if my recollection of the document is inaccurate. I’m sure thought that some dopers must have come across this article before and if they could please provide a cite I would be grateful, even if it is only to point out how incredibly poor my recollection is.

Finally – I hope you understand my nervousness at posting on a religious topic as it is something that a lot of people are very passionate about. I hope nothing in this post has caused offence to anyone in the way it was written. If it has – mea culpa.

2

Not holding a doctrine in divinity, I think this is wrong. It is my understanding that once you accept Jesus, you can’t un-accept him. During her life she may grow closer or further away from God, but it is still within the context of her being a believer. No human can be perfect in their faith, and that is a sin, but Jesus would forgive that sin and all your others once you accept him.

3

I think it will have to do with how you view the concepts of grace. I’m not sure about Catholics and how good deeds factor in, but I think I can still give an introduction to the Protestant perspective. Ultimately it has got to do with what kind of God you are dealing with.

“Early” Protestants (eg Calvin, Luther) were more pessimistic. You couldn’t be just good enough in your deeds or pious enough, you had to be one of the Elect, predestined for Heaven. So if in case (2) the old lady was not one of the Elect, she would not be going up.

Later on the tone became more moderate. The focus was not on the strict, forbidding God exemplified in the Old Testament, but rather the omnibenevolent and forgiving Father. It is possible to wind around the “Elect” argument and say that even though some people are predestined for Heaven and some are not, the latter are not condemned for eternity because that would contradict the idea of a all loving God.

4

Excuse my ignorance, but if I decide I no longer believe in God, is that un-accepting him? For instance, if I decide that I was wrong in believing in Him and that I was mistaken and in fact there is no God - is that not un-accpetance?

5

If you truly did not believe in God, if you thought you had been mistaken during that time in which you believed in God, then you would not be asking the question. You’re asking “will God let me into heaven if I don’t believe he exists?”

In every relationship there are good times and bad times, estrangement and reconciliation. If you have ever had a personal relationship with God, whether in the context or organized religion or not, then I think that God will always “wait you out” during your times of estrangement.

6

I’m sure there is no misunderstanding but just in case - I’m not asking for me. The question should be more accurately phrased :

Would the lady in question not be allowed to enter Heaven for the reasons given according to an accurate intepretation of the ‘Rules’?

In other words, is the reason given an accurate representation of the facts? This is why initially I was going to post in GQ as I know that there are many different opinions on the subject but I wanted to know if factually the reasons I remember given in the article were correct.

Has anyone else seen this article BTW?

Obligatory Disclaimer : I realise that we cannot prove that any behavioural pattern will guarantee entry since we cannot prove heaven exists etc etc. Just from the information we have to hand, what can we deduce?

7

That became a debate within Calvinism. Traditional Calvinism believed, like you do, in “eternal security”; that once you were in a state of grace, you couldn’t lose it. Another group of Calvinists, the Arminians, believed that it was possible for someone to lose or reject divine grace, and therefore, someone who once had grace could wind up damned.

8

Oops, my mistake, I forgot the context and personalized your question.

I’d be very careful about accepting any “Rules” governing the behavior of God when the Rules are written by men. No, strike “careful” and replace it with the most severe form of “skeptical” devisable.

My general take is that God is not willing for any of his* children to wander off into the cold. This comes from a lifetime of undisciplined reading of scripture, stumbling attempts to “connect” with God, and purposeful hanging out with faith-filled people. In other words, no theologian (or logician) here. But I’m bright enough to discern that God really does not will it that he should lose any of us if he can help it. And, being God, he can help A LOT.

The overall impression I’m left with is that God will do what he will do. Any attempt on our part to predict his behavior based on tests we can devise will only serve to distract us from the really interesting part, which is pursuing a relationship with him.

*Necessary disclaimer: I’m gonna use the personal pronoun here, recognizing that God is spirit and thus neither male nor female. I’ll go with “he/him/his” just 'cause it’s less torturous than alternative forms of writing. No chauvinism intended.

9

As a Christian all my life, I have always heard something interesting ( I can’t say where this is written, if it is in the Bible or not, or if it is even written anywhere at all). I wish I knew why I, and my friends, all believe this. Anyway, the idea is that if a newborn child, who doens’t have the mental capacity to understand God, were to die, the child would go to heaven. This also applies to anyone, say a tribal person in a remote land who commits sins all his life, if he has never been given the chance to hear about Jesus, then he will go to heaven.

This sounds like some sort of magical “default” way to get into heaven, and there is a good chance that it is no more than some myth with no basis on actual Biblical teaching. It’s just something I’ve always believed.

Also, some Baptists believe that once you are baptised, and have accepted Jesus into your heart, then you are saved, and nothing you can do will ever change that. We joke that we could just go out and kill anyone and commit any sin we wanted, and still go to heaven based on this belief. I used to believe it, but I don’t anymore. If someone says to God “I don’t want anything to do with you, I don’t want in heaven, don’t even believe in you,” then I believe God will give this person what he or she wants, and they won’t go to heaven. It’s free will.

10

I think part of this line of thought is attributable to a good-ol’ American sense of “fair play” - it’s not fair to consign somebody to hell who never had a shot at redemption. Of course, most Protestant sects say there’s nothing anyone can do to save themselves, so in effect we’re all in the same boat as the baby; and if God has promised to call us home, why wouldn’t he do the same for a true innocent?

In the same vein, a “pagan” who had never heard the Word is just as innocent as a baby born to believers. Somewhere in one of the letters of Paul he mentions righteous pagans as having the word of God in their hearts, or something close to that. I’ve always interpreted this, in my uniquely bleeding-heart-liberal way, as meaning that they get a “free pass”; if they live “godlike” lives, they belong to God, even if they don’t know him by the same name as we do.

. . . I suspect I could get kicked out of most mainstream denominations for this philosophy, but it works for me.