“Whoever has the Son has life; whoever does not have the Son of God does not have life” (1 John 5:12). Salvation comes through Christ alone. Human religions are not paths to God and salvation, nor can their adherents be saved and be in Christ without explicitly putting faith in Jesus. The only way for a person to be saved is for them to hear the gospel, believe it, and become a Christian.
What about the many people, though, who live and die without having any opportunity to hear the gospel? Since they have no opportunity to hear about Jesus during their lives, it is not possible for them to believe in Jesus and be saved before they die. Must we believe that all of these unevangelized people are damned without God giving them any opportunity at all to be saved?
Such an idea is not seen as problematic by Calvinists, who believe that all non-Christians, whether they have an opportunity to hear the gospel or not, are eternally predestined by God to damnation, without God giving them any opportunity to be saved. As I explain in a previous post, Why I Am Not a Calvinist, I find this Calvinist idea of God creating people and eternally damning them without giving them any chance to be saved extremely problematic. God is Love, and it is impossible to reconcile the idea that God loves people with the idea that God creates them in order to eternally torment them, giving them no opportunity to escape.
No, God “wants all people to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth” (1 Tim 2:4). While Scripture is clear that not everyone will be saved, this must be because some people freely choose to reject God’s offer of salvation, not because God delights in creating people simply in order to damn them. Thus, it is more reasonable to affirm the Arminian view that human beings have free will with regard to whether they put faith in Christ or not.
If an Arminian believes that all of the unevangelized are damned without being given any opportunity to be saved, though, they are left with the same problem. Like Calvinists, they still believe that there are some people whom God creates and then damns without giving them any opportunity to be saved.
One proposed solution to this problem has been to claim that all of the unevangelized are people who God knew would not have accepted the gospel even if they had an opportunity to hear it. This proposed solution is, to say the least, deeply problematic. If human beings really have free will, then there is no way that God could know what they would freely choose if faced with a decision they never actually face. If it is completely certain that a person would choose to reject Jesus if they heard about Him, no matter what, then this necessarily implies that their decisions are deterministic, rather than free.
The only reasonable way to resolve the problem of the fate of the unevangelized, then, is to believe that God does, somehow, give them an opportunity to hear and to believe the gospel. How, exactly, He does this, we cannot say. We can only speculate. Perhaps this opportunity occurs at death. Or perhaps there is a period of time during which the souls of the dead continue to be given an opportunity to repent and believe the gospel after their deaths. Or perhaps they will be given this opportunity when all the dead are resurrected before the Final Judgment.
One major objection to the idea that the unevangelized will have an opportunity to accept the gospel after their deaths is that it is speculative and is not based in Scripture. However, I would argue that there is actually support for the idea of post-mortem evangelism in Scripture, if we consider what Scripture says about the salvation of Old Testament believers.
During the Old Testament period, none of God’s faithful people believed in Jesus, because He had not yet come. They looked forward in faith to the promises of God, but they did not have saving faith in Christ. Yet, the New Testament is clear that Abraham and other Old Testament saints are saved rather than damned. The author of Hebrews points to many Old Testament believers as examples of faithfulness for Christians to emulate, and then concludes, “These were all commended for their faith, yet none of them received what had been promised, since God had planned something better for us so that only together with us would they be made perfect” (Heb 11:39-40). In other words, the Old Testament saints did not receive salvation (in the Christian sense) until Jesus came and established His Church. Then, their souls accepted Jesus as the fulfillment of the hope of Israel, and received eternal salvation.
If Old Testament figures who never heard the gospel, but looked forward to the promises of God, could be saved by Jesus after their deaths, then it is reasonable to believe that people today who have never heard the gospel, but look for God as best they can, could be saved by Jesus after their deaths. Granted, the parallel is not exact, since Old Testament believers were members of God’s covenant people who put faith in the very words of God, while the unevangelized of other religions today are not. But, if we believe that God’s prevenient grace is at work among the unevangelized, preparing their hearts to receive the gospel, it is reasonable to believe that God would give them the opportunity to receive the gospel they never had an opportunity to hear during their lifetimes, just as God did with Old Testament saints.
Another major objection to the idea that the unevangelized will have an opportunity to accept the gospel after their deaths is that it undermines the Church’s motivation to carry out the work of evangelism. Why invest great energy in evangelizing unreached people if they will all get a chance to accept the gospel anyway? My response would be that, just because it is possible for an unevangelized person to eventually be saved through Jesus, this does not mean that we can be confident that they will, in fact, eventually be saved through Jesus. The only way that we can be confident that a person will actually be saved is if we see them put faith in Jesus during this life. Our choices and actions as Christians do make a real spiritual impact on others, and we have a responsibility to do whatever we can, in word and deed, to influence others to believe in Jesus while we have the opportunity. At the end of the day, our Lord has commanded His Church to evangelize the whole world, and we must simply obey.
Believing that it is possible for unevangelized people to eventually be saved should not undermine our motivation to evangelize. But it should assure us that God is not a monster who creates some people just so He can cast them into Hell, without any opportunity to avoid it. God loves all people, and desires that all people be saved. That is truly good news that is worth sharing with the whole world.
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