One of the most common objections to our faith is the exclusiveness of Jesus. Skeptics will ask, “How can God be fair, making Jesus the only way to the Kingdom, when millions of people have lived and died without ever hearing of him?”
Without ever looking deep enough, people often reject Jesus as the only way to God, preferring to accept a pantheistic approach (many roads, one destination), because it seems more agreeable to them. They will call you closed minded and write you off as a shallow thinker. Be assured, however, there is good and diverse rationale, (that doesn’t nullify God’s justice) to the exclusivity of Jesus.
First none of us deserve to be saved. Humanity is broken and fallen. We have each rejected God and he would be fair and just in leaving us to our own vices. When we adjust our perspective this way, we understand there is tremendous grace in the fact that there is even one way back to him. It is a very ugly thing to be a criminal, and when offered an opportunity for acquittal, to sniff at it and respond, “This can’t be the only way.”
But why offer some people a chance to God and not others? If we ask this question we are limiting God – how can we know this is the case just because some people die without ever (allegedly) hearing the name of Jesus? God’s message of salvation is not limited to the single vehicle of human evangelism, (although he has made it clear it is to be the primary platform for the Good News). Jesus broke through directly to Saint Paul whose salvation came as a result from his message (Gal. 1:12). There are other places in the Bible where God spoke directly to Jews and pagans through visions, dreams, and even angels. Examples are Abimelech, Pharaoh and Balaam, not to mention the prophets. This is called the Universal Opportunity view. It rightly holds that God can save who he wants, when he wants, with or without our help. I’ve heard it put it this way: “The only thing that can thwart the desire of the omnipotent Creator to save all people, is their own unwillingness to be saved” (Boyd & Eddy 183). And I would even add that God could break through our unwillingness if he so desired. Jesus makes it clear that God chooses us and draws us to him – we don’t choose him (John 12:32, 15:16, Rom. 9:16).
Even if some people never get a chance to hear the salvation message we cannot call an all-knowing God unjust. Wouldn’t our God know if someone would respond to a message if they heard it? C. S. Lewis profoundly wrote, “I believe that if a million chances were likely to do good, they would be given … Finality must come some time, and it does not require a very robust faith to believe that omniscience knows when” (126). Those who would not respond to God remain in objection to him, whether they have had a million chances or zero – they remain who they are. The peculiar thing about those who are perishing is not their ignorance of God, but their ability to block him out of their lives. This is why Lewis said he believes “the damned are, in one sense, successful rebels to the end; that the doors of hell are locked on the inside” (130).
Another position is the Inclusivist View, which claims that Jesus is ontologically necessary for salvation, but not epistemologically necessary, (that is, Jesus is the only savior of humanity, but it is possible to attain salvation without explicit knowledge of him. It could mean people will be judged by how they respond to the limited truth they have, not the information they don’t have). This would account for all the people before Christ came, infant deaths, and people with mental disabilities. We see biblical support for this where Jesus welcomes those into the kingdom who did not recall, feeding him visiting him in prison, etc. (Matt. 25:36-40). Paul also wrote, “… we have our hope set on the living God, who is the savior of all people, especially those who believe” (1 Tim. 4:10). This implies God can save some of those who did not have a chance to believe.
For this reason, it would not surprise me to find some people in heaven who, although never heard Jesus’ name on earth, are perplexed to find they got there by the cover of his blood, without knowing the blood was at work in their life. This very thing happens in Lewis’s allegory called, The Last Battle. One of the antagonists, who worshiped what he thought was the True God, found himself in the afterlife confronted by the One True God. Shaken to find he was worshiping the wrong god all along, the man fell at the feet of the Glorious One and this scene unfolded:
[The man thought,] Surly this is the hour of death, for [The True God] will know that I served [the wrong god] all my days and not him. Nevertheless, it is better to see [The True God] and die, than to be [ruler] of the world and live and not to have seen Him.’ But The Glorious One bent down … and said, Son, thou art welcome. But I said, Alas, Lord, I am no son of thine but the servant of [the wrong god]. He answered, Child, all the service thou has done to [him], I account as service done to me (517).
I left out much of the context of this allegory for the sake of brevity, but the point being made here is, God knows the hearts of men and he saves whomever he pleases (Romans 9). (This doesn’t relieve us the obligation to evangelize, for (a) we have been commanded to do it, and (b) it is better for communities to live knowing Jesus, than live without knowing him.) Thus, it is offensive for us, as mere people, to be presumptuous enough to questions God’s methods of salvation. Anyone questioning Jesus as the only Way is likely not asking with purely philanthropic motives. Dr. David Stern astutely acknowledged that people “often raise the issue not out of concern for the ‘pitiful lost heathen’ but as a dodge to justify their own unbelief; the very form of the question assumes that God is unjust, and not worthy of their trust, that the ‘primitive tribesman’ is an innocent ‘noble savage’ and God the guilty party” (335). As we know, all men, (primitive or sophisticated) are not innocent, and God cannot be guilty.
This type of objection is likely the result of a straw man the unbeliever has set up, only to knock down. They don’t have the intent to take an objective look at the claims of Jesus in the first place. Those who may have some genuine concern for the un-evangelized must first decide how they will respond to the grace being offered to them, and let God worry about those who have not yet had the privilege of the message. You can be sure God is a better caregiver than they, and he has more concern for the un-evangelized than any other person. Once the skeptic has a life changing conversion, God may very well use him or her to reach those who haven’t yet heard the Good News.
References:
- Boyd, Gregory and Eddy, Paul: Across the Spectrum; Understanding the Issues in Evangelical Theology
- Lewis, C. S.: "The Last Battle" in The Chronicles of Narnia
- Lewis, C. S.: The Problem of Pain
- Stern, David: Jewish New Testament Commentary
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