This is the counterpart to my previous post. I had concluded that, against popular belief, if you are not a Christian, you can go to heaven if you had never heard of Jesus. Now I will set up a hypothetical situation that will require another line to be drawn around the limits of God's mercy.
A child is born. The child has no siblings, and is being raised by a single mother. For the sake of keeping this hypothetical, I will not name a country or geographical location. The mother is somewhat mentally unbalanced, but not so much that she cannot raise a child and show love to him (it could be a "her" but for the sake of not saying "it" I will use "him"). The mother cares deeply for the child, and without a husband or any other children, she protects him and loves him with everything that she has. The problem, however, is the mother's paranoia.
The mother is an extreme atheist. She believes that Christianity is a literal plague. She believes that to believe in God is a contagious mental disease that you can only escape by staying away from religious talk, especially Christianity (this is the mentally unbalanced part of her). She raises the child alone and isolated in order to protect him from this disease, not allowing television, newspapers, or radio to corrupt her child's innocent mind. Constantly, daily, she drills him on what he will have to do to survive in the world without becoming infected. She fears for the safety of her child when he must go out of her protection. Christianity, after all, is extremely dangerous, just like every other religion. People will kill themselves and kill other people for it (surely a sign of mental disease). It will ruin your life forever, whether you give up your time or your wealth, you will never be the same once you are infected. The child must not even accept the stupid idea that there is an invisible being somewhere. How silly. As soon as he acknowledges the existence of something as stupid and insane as that, he's as good as dead.
The child is raised in peace. He is happy to have such a caring mother who protects him from the evils of the outside. He grows up drawing pictures of fighting the diseased Christians, hoping doctors can one day cure their plight. As he gets older, he learns math, and learns how to read English by texts that his mother writes for him. He dreams about what the outside looks like, and what type of dangers his mother has to fight against just to bring home the groceries. He is very happy to be safe inside his home where even the windows are plastered over so that the sun cannot make its way inside, and the door is latched many times with many locks that only his mother possesses the key to.
The day approaches. The child must leave the house for the first time in his life. He is 16 years old. It is his first time he will have ever left his home. He finds out that one of the reasons his mother was so frightened for his life was that there was a large evangelical Christian church right next to their house. The Christians in that church had apparently discovered that the child was being protected from their disease, and had attempted to infect the mother and make their way to the defenseless child inside their isolated house. The child was told to be weary, to keep his mind alert, and not let any one talk about God or any other silly nonsense.
The child leaves the house, and walks by the church. He is caught! He cannot escape their glances, they walk towards him. It seems like only an instant, and he is surrounded! The first word out of their mouths is "Jesus loves you." Who was this Jesus? His mother had not mentioned a Jesus. But she did tell him that they would tell him anything and everything insane (they couldn't help it, they're diseased after all) in order to infect his healthy mind. They caught him in a religious fervor and brought him inside against his will. They strapped him down to a chair and told him this man Jesus was God and had died for his sins (which apparently they believed he had). He only had to believe and repent of his sins. He escaped from their torment and ran out in a panic, tripped on the curb outside the church as they chased him shouting about Jesus and God nonsense, and he was hit by a car and died on contact.
He went to hell, right? He had rejected the message of Jesus. He had rejected the religious fanaticism of Christianity. He's got no excuse, right? There's no way that he should have said no to the wonderful good news of Christ, right?
The point of this is to force another line to be drawn. If this ridiculous situation had actually happened (crazier things happen in the world), then the theory that you can go to heaven as long you have never been exposed to Christianity would place the poor child in hell. Should we be willing to say that? I'm not. It's possible to be brainwashed in a matter of months, so imagine what would happen if someone was raised since birth to believe the world is one way and no other, then can we really blame them when they turn the option of Christianity down? I am not willing to do that. If you are, then I suppose there is little point in reading this. I wish you would think about it though. It's so easy to group everyone in the world into one category; a category more like us. It's easy (and tempting) to view the whole world as one big USA with churches on every corner (here in the Bible Belt) and theistic talk throughout our society. It is so much easier to say "If you've heard of Jesus and rejected it then you're going to hell" than it is to say "If you've been brainwashed since birth to not believe in it and only get one exposure (and it happens to be by radical extremists) and you still turn it down then you go to hell."
So now hopefully you may be forming your own hypothetical illustrations in your mind that may make more sense to you than my example. Hopefully you are coming to the realization that it is unfair to claim the theory that if you have heard of Jesus and reject it you are going to hell. Because then one can say, what counts as hearing of Jesus? If you've heard the sentence "Jesus died for your sins" and reject it, are you going to hell? No, because how are you to know who Jesus is? If you hear the sentence "God (an all powerful being) became human in order to fix what we broke," and reject it, are you going to hell? I would say no. It depends on the context you hear it in, how much you trust the person telling you, what you've been raised with, etc. Then what are we doing? We are drawing a line. I reject the theory that says just because you've heard of Jesus and denied it as truth you're going to hell. This never gives anyone the benefit of the doubt. In fact, there is no such thing as a "benefit" of a "doubt" in this case. No matter what led the person to be confronted with the idea of Jesus, if one ignores every influence on their lives, place them in a vacuum, and isolate the one moment when they are introduced to Jesus, and view that as the moment that defines where their soul goes for eternity, then I must say that is unfair and actually quite merciless.
We like to imagine that those who reject Jesus and go to hell are really those that get a full understanding of Christianity and then reject it, but that's not where contemporary theology stands. In reality, probably a lot of people who reject Christianity really don't understand what it is (although I think many "Christians" don't understand Christianity), and yet they are held responsible (by Christians) for the destination of their souls. This bothers me. I hope it bothers you.
I will briefly discuss a relevant point.
Jesus states in Luke 6.37 "Do not judge, and you will not be judged; do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven."
Judge --> To form an opinion or estimation of after careful consideration.
To pass sentence on; condemn.
If we make the statement "Those who have rejected Christianity are going to hell" then we have judged. We have passed a sentence on someone and condemned their souls. If say that atheists who try to convert Christians are going to hell, then we have condemned. If we are to take the above words of Jesus seriously, then we are not to say that anyone is going to hell, for that would be condemning them. We should forgive them and love them. That is being a Christian.
Being a Christian is not feeling good about yourself because you know that although 70% of the world's population is going to hell you're not because you were lucky enough to be born of Christian parents or lucky enough that you happened to go to that one church service that day when you felt bad and got saved. No. Being a Christian is about loving people. You may say that converting people is out of love of them because you don't want their souls to go to hell, but then your love is based on your prejudice condemnation.
I am not saying that missionaries are not Christian. I am saying that there are ways of spreading Christianity that do not fully reside within the teachings of Jesus. I think we as Christian should reevaluate what it means to be one. I do not believe that it means we have any right to tell everyone else they are going to hell. That's human nature, not Christianity. It is human nature to elevate the self and degrade everyone else. I believe it is God's nature as revealed in Jesus to lower the self in order to raise up others. To love others more than the self. To feed the hungry; to hug the weeping; to comfort the sorrowful; to encourage the desperate. I am sometimes afraid of what Christianity has evolved into. Sometimes I am even hesitant to call myself a Christian because of the connotation. That is the tragedy.
To bring the theme of the topic together, I declare an armistice. I declare an armistice between those who are "saved" against those who are "lost." I feel that those declaring war on the "lost" should really wonder if they're on the wrong side of the battle.
I have asked you once before to draw your line in your theology. I have asked you now twice. It is my hope that you refuse to. It is my hope that you refuse to draw a line and fall on the mercy and love of God.
"I do not judge anyone who hears my words and does not keep them, for I came not to judge the world, but to save the world." - Jesus, John 12.47
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