The fate of the Unevangelised

I hesitate to post on this. It is not something you should talk about lightly and without feeling the weight of what you are discussing. We are all aware of it and so usually when Christian's are asked about it they tend to be tentative in their response and emphasize how we don't know the fate of anyone, and it is not our place to judge. Instead we rightly emphasise that we know the one who judges and he is just and merciful and we want to leave it with him.

Nevertheless, I have come to the conclusion that the reason why we have become uncertain about this question is because we have forgotten two points of massive importance. You may want to disagree with the two points I make, but I think it is helpful at least to identify that our response to these two questions determine your answer to a question about the fate of the unevangelised.

1. Creation only communicates the law and not the Gospel

The law is true knowledge of God, and Creation communicates this to us. It presents us with God as he is loving, kind, just and powerful. However, it just presents us with him, and tells us nothing of how we should relate to him - especially as we then look at ourselves. Because of this we create our own ways of relating to him. Our own 'gospels'. We may ignore him because we cannot imagine how we could relate to him. We may bring him close by worshipping created things. We may try and work our way to a place where we can approach him by good works or acts of contemplation. All of these work only by suppressing the knowledge of God that we have through Creation. They work by downplaying the demands of the law, or making them the 'gospel'. Either way we are left without excuse.

Because the distinction between law and Gospel has been forgotten in much contemporary Christianity, we think there is only one kind of knowledge of God. Because of this we merge or confuse law and Gospel and make them both communicated through creation. Therefore the hypothetical unevangelised man alone on an island in the Pacific has the same kind of knowledge as the well-taught Christian in England, just a different amount. In fact there is not just a quantitative difference between the knowledge of God, but a qualitative difference as well.

Classically, when considering the difference between general and special revelation we go to Calvin's Institutes. We would benefit from listening to Luther as well:

Everyone naturally has a general idea that there is a God [...] But someone may object: "If all people know God, why does Paul say that before the proclamation of the gospel the Galatians did not know God?" I reply that there is a twofold knowledge of God [duplex est cognitio Dei], general and particular. All people have the general knowledge, namely that God exists, that he has created heaven and earth, that he is righteous, that he punishes the wicked, etc. But people do not know what God proposes concerning us, what he wants to give and to do, so that he might deliver us from sin and death, and to save us - which is the proper and true knowledge of God [propria et vera est cognitio Dei]. Thus it can happen that someone's face may be familiar to me but I do not really know him, because I do not know his intentions.

(from 1535 Lectures on Galatians, in p.99, The Christian Theology Reader ed by A McGrath)

2. The Holy Spirit can only be received through the specific word of the Gospel

Constantly we are tempted to have the persons of the Trinity acting separately from one another. One way in which we do this is through a concept of a free-floating Spirit who acts apart from the Word - that is the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Of course all of creation is sustained by God's Word and the action of his Spirit. In that sense the Spirit does operate even where the Gospel is not preached but he does not indwell believers apart from it.

In what way, then, does the Holy Spirit come to us? How and in what way does he impart himself? The Spirit works faith in the human being inwardly, but never apart from means, never without the external "physical Word" [...]

Luther would formulate the central thesis for his understanding of the Holy Spirit as "The Holy Spirit has called me through the gospel." This means: although the Holy Spirit cannot be apprehended, he is not an incomprehensible fluidity, but comes in a clearly specific Word that can be heard [...]

If the Holy Spirit calls only "through the gospel," but the gospel is gospel only as it is distinguished from the law, then the distinction between law and gospel is decisive with respect to the teaching about the Holy Spirit, about pneumatology, as well. Thus the work of the Spirit is, first of all, to sharpen the law and to bring about God's judgment against sin; only then does the Spirit work through the second and final Word of God, the gospel, in that he forgives sin and creates faith [...]

Whoever agrees today with Luther's understanding of the Holy Spirit, according to which he binds himself to the external Word, and is in agreement with it, muct be ready for the hard task of a fundamental critique of modern subjectivism.

(pp.242-251, Oswald Bayer, Martin Luther's Theology: A Contemporary Interpretation).