God's providence is incredible. On Thursday, after a week of Rob Bell posts hogging Google Reader, out of the blue I had a weighty conversation with someone really wrestling with this issue.
All the musing that I had been doing in relative leisure was put to use, but I finished realising the utter insufficiency of myself, my thoughts and my words for the task. For the last 2 days my mind has wandered back to the subject again and again. Here are some random reflections.
- I can't see how people who have not heard can be saved in the present because:
- Creation tells us about God's grace in giving us life, but not of forgiveness for us destroying that life.
- If salvation is a personal relationship, knowing God in Christ, then we can't be 'anonymous Christians'
- Any salvation without hearing ends up being legalistic, because it ceases to be reception of a gift and becomes a test to be good enough
- The Holy Spirit is found wherever the Son is found and the Son as Redeemer is found wherever the cross is preached. So there can be no regeneration without preaching.
- In principle I can see no problem with post-mortem repentance and faith in response to a revelation of the grace of God in Christ after death, for example through some kind of purgatory. The thing is that the whole NT and historic church says that Christ will "come again to judge the living and the dead" (Apostles Creed). In his first advent he did not come to condemn the world, but in his second advent he will come to condemn. That puts fear in my heart, as it did in Paul's (2 Cor 5:10-11), but it is unavoidable that "it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment" (Heb 9:27)
- Isn't it crazy... just plain crazy...that God has made the salvation of people dependant on them being told by the church? That's people like me! But "the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men", so although I can't imagine why he has left things to jars of clay, he is wiser than me in doing it.
- Any kind of inclusivist view on the salvation of those who haven't heard tends to cut out the church. Perhaps it is the lack of a strong ecclesiology and an emphasis on the "personal relationship" (by which we mean "individual relationship") with Jesus that has meant that we have forgotten why to have God as our Father we must have the Church as our mother (Cyprian).
- I really do not deserve to have heard when others haven't! This week, for the first time in years I've been shaken by something that begins to approach the thinking of war veterans on TV who ask "why did I get to live and they didn't?"
- The problem of the seeming unfairness of people being condemned for the sin of rejecting God the Creator only, when they never had chance to accept or reject God the Redeemer, is no greater than that of the seeming unfairness that God chose only some of those who did hear to have new hearts. It is a problem we cannot solve.
- The revelation of God's love is full. There is no more loving act that we can know than Jesus carrying the cross to Calvary and dying there. Yet people watched and hated him all the more for his love. Paul testifies to the same division as a result of his "ministry of reconciliation". Adam and Eve knew nothing but love and walked out on that relationship. No demonstration of God's love post-mortem is going to be more powerful than Christ on the cross.
- Have I ever really understood mission to my neighbour and the world as anything other than a superfluous "nice to have" even though it is essential and desperately needed? Suddenly reading John and Romans the need to invite and to to proclaim seems to be behind almost everything John and Paul are saying.
No comments:
Post a Comment