Hope: What happens to the unreached when they die?
I ran across an interesting conversation at jdgreear.com about the motives for mission: particularly the question of what happens to the unreached when they die. Now, this is a difficult topic, one that we have to grapple with. I think everyone does, particularly everyone in missions. I have. It can be a stone over which we stumble and break. (And perhaps I should put out a disclaimer: these thoughts, as all my blog posts, are my own, and not—necessarily!—an official position of the organization with which I work. I am given a not inconsiderable latitude for which I am grateful.)
Here is the problem: someone never hears the Good News – they are separated for the whole of their life from Christ, Christianity and the Gospel. It can happen. Think of this woman: one of the Taimani Aimaq of Afghanistan, one of the least-reached people groups in the world. There are about half a million Taimani Aimaq, who live nomadic lives in northwest Afghanistan. They are cut off from most of the world: no radio, no newspapers, little contact with others. It’s possible for someone to grow up as an Aimaq and never know anything of the world outside where they live. What happens when they die?
There are several different possible answers depending on your theological persuasion. Let us survey a few of them.
The first possible answer: having never accepted Christ as Lord and Savior, they go to hell, where they are roasted for all eternity in hellfire, tormented and tortured by dark demonic spirits. I find this a difficult answer. It seems to me to be informed by a view of God that focuses on his wrath. It says that all humanity is fallen and deserves nothing but eternal torture. It emphasis Romans 3:16: all have sinned and fallen short. And these things are true. But what about people who have never heard them? It seems difficult to me that a people who have never heard about Jesus, and thus cannot accept him as Savior, should be condemned to eternal torment.
The second possible answer: having never heard of Christ—through no fault of their own, this being the responsibility of the Church—they get a free pass. No one told them about judgment, so they get to skip the jail part and head directly to heaven. They are not judged on their sins because they did not know they were sinning. This is a difficult answer, too. It emphasizes God’s grace, and the church’s guilt in not doing its job. But the logical conclusion is that we ought to ignore the Great Commission, because if you bring the Gospel to some heathen people and they say ‘no’ they are automatically consigned to hell, whereas if we’d just left them alone they would have gotten to go to heaven. This makes it our fault all the way around.
A third possibility: those who’ve never heard get to hear at the moment of death. Jesus (or an angel appears to them), witnesses to them, and they get to choose right then and there. Now, this is an interesting possibility, but again challenges. Jesus or angels would be possibly better witnesses than us, so wouldn’t it be better to leave people in ignorance until the point of death and let the better witness handle it? And if this is what’s happening, then why did Jesus tell us to preach the Gospel to all creation? Why spend billions doing it?
A fourth possibility: that when we die we go to an intermediate stage—a sort of Purgatory. The truly rebellious go straight to hell, and the rest of us pay for our misdeeds and then get to go to Heaven. Now, this is a kind of nice option, as it deals easily with those who are “really bad” and those who are “ignorant” while giving those who are “saved” a straight pass into Heaven. The only problem with it is that it emphasizes works as opposed to grace.
The fifth (and most commonly heard by me) possibility: they are judged by how they responded to the witness of creation. Even without the Gospel, anyone can sense there is a Supreme Being out there, and how they lived their life is how they’ll be judged. Again, this seems like a remarkably good answer except that it sounds remarkably like you can earn your way to heaven, and it seems that once they hear the Gospel it is far easier to end up in hell—a simple no to a badly presented witness and you’re on your way to the roasting and the tormenting and the pitchforking.
This is not an easy conundrum, and it becomes problematic because it says a lot about your view of God and the church. Part of the reason I think it becomes so emotional is that it brings questions of eternity, horrific pictures of damnation, and questions of fairness into the issue of grace versus justice. On the one hand, we think terrible people ought to roast; but on the other hand, we think people who never had a chance somehow deserve to have one.
Greater minds than mine (of which there are many, many) have grappled with this issue and come up with all sorts of different answers. C. S. Lewis, for example, indicated in The Last Battle that he felt the young Calormene, who worshipped the demonic Tash all his life, was counted in the Great Lion Aslan’s camp because “you can’t do something bad in my name, and you can’t do something good in Tash’s name”: a sort of inclusivism that many people have found challenging. N. T. Wright in Surprised by Hope has—as far as I can understand him—a very different view of eternal life and hell in which people who reject God simply become less human, less sentient, over time. The Annihilationist view says people aren’t roasted, they simply cease to exist: and you can make a case for saying the fires of hell are eternal but that doesn’t mean being burnt to ash takes an eternity, it just means you can’t stop hell from doing its job. Then of course there is the ‘standard’ evangelical position: no Sinner’s Prayer, no eternal life.
My response, perhaps, is to cheat, or to surrender. I look at all these things and say, at least for now, that I don’t know the answer. Instead, I grapple with it:
- I know God is just. The rebelliousness and habitual sin of mankind must be dealt with. No one gets a free pass (Romans 3).
- I know God loves us. I do not believe he will not roast a soul in eternal torment because that person, through no fault of their own, never heard the Good News. We are saved by accepting the sovereignty and grace of God and a personal relationship, not through recitation of the Sinner’s Prayer as if it were a magical formula. I do not know how this works, but I know the character of God (check Genesis 18:25). (In this area I tend to fall under Answer 5 above—for those who have never had an opportunity to hear about Christ. But I acknowledge this is my human desire for mercy, and to understand God, and I certainly don’t claim that anything my brain can come up with represents reality. His ways are far higher than ours.)
- I don’t know what happens if you don’t know Christ, but I do know rejecting him leads to eternal separation from him. Rejecting the Sovereign Lord is rebellion. Sorry, that’s just how it works (check John 14:6).
- I know it can be easy to reject a gospel presentation (especially a bad one), but I also know if you’re one of those fortunate enough to be in touch with Christ, Christianity and the Gospel you’re also likely to receive more than one chance to hear. And just because some people reject a witness from a Christian because of how the Christian behaves, doesn’t mean we should be disobedient to Christ’s command.
- I know we may not know what happens to a person who never knows about Christ when they die, but we do know what happens when they live: it is very easy to fall into sin, to fall into rebellion, to fall into a lifelong habit of doing what is wrong. While I suppose it is possible—I don’t know—that an unreached person can live in such a way that they will go to be with God when they die, it is equally possible—perhaps more so—to fall into a pattern of sin that is difficult to break (perhaps impossible?) apart from the Good News. It’s always easier to live in grace.
And yet, I show you a more excellent way.
Ultimately, we must be on mission not because people are “going to Hell” (which many undoubtedly are) but because Christ commanded us to. The hell-or-heaven status of people is not the motivation: obedience is. We don’t shirk from obedience just because a Gospel presentation could make things more complicated.
However, we surely should catch the heart of God, the motivation of God, that sinners should be saved. And a lot of the arguments surveyed here have to do with what we are being saved from. That always seems to be the sticking point. Do we roast? Do we cease to exist? How do we get out of the hellfire and brimstone?
Surely this is less important than what they are being saved to?
Perhaps one of our problems is that we get our eyes on the negative so much—on our perverse enjoyment of other people suffering, on the drama of hell, ‘preaching hellfire and brimstone’—and we do not focus enough on the joys and delights of Heaven. Perhaps—just perhaps—we have a clearer view of hell than of heaven. We often think of heaven as a sort of eternal worship service: perched on a cloud learning to strum a harp. Maybe it is difficult for us to drum up enough enthusiasm for bringing people to this ideal, and so we try to motivate by saying, “well, but the alternative is so much worse.”
Perhaps if we had a better view of heaven, we would worry less about hell and more about spreading what is truly Good News: that there is a future, and a hope: that it is grander and greater than anything we can possibly imagine: that it is about ruling and reigning for all eternity: that over a thousand years from now you could still be alive, still learning, still growing, still doing great things, never hungry, never sick, never afraid. Isn’t that something to spread?
I don’t know under what conditions someone goes to hell, but I do know what Christ has called us to. He did not come to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved. He did not come to judge, but to rescue the lost and to destroy the works of the devil. He did not commission us to spread a dire warning, but to spread Good News of an everlasting Kingdom that will promises resurrection and eternal life. He spoke very little of hell and mostly of the Kingdom of Heaven. Shouldn’t we be doing the same?
(Original post here:- http://bit.ly/2bIum1)
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