Board index ‹ Heaven and Hell

[Loony Toons]

What about people who are born in areas of the world ignorant to the christian faith and Jesus? They commit sins and live sinful lives, do they go to hell?

[jimwalton]

2 Corinthians 5.10 says everyone will receive what is fair, what is due to that person, whether good or bad.

Romans 5.13 says that people will not be held accountable for what they didn't or couldn't possibly know. Paul says people will only be held accountable for the information they had and what they did with it. There is a principal of reasonable accountability. According to Romans 5.13, people are not held accountable for what they had no possibility of knowing or knowing about. In Deuteronomy 1.39, the children who were too young to make a realistic decision are not judged, but are shown mercy; their level of accountability was directly related to their moral awareness. Isa. 7.15-16 teaches the same thing: God deals differently with people based on their knowledge. So we're getting a sense of the fairness of God, and that he takes many things into consideration as he makes his perfect decisions. So people who haven't heard will be judged according to a fair standard.

So what about people who lived in Asia, or on Papua New Guinea, or South Africa, or Alaska, who never heard of Jesus but lived and died? They will be judged fairly given their own motivations and actions. People will be judged according to the information they had, what they did with it, and their motives behind it. Every judgment will be fair based on what information people had, what they knew, what their motives were, and how they behaved given what they had access to. Otherwise, it wouldn't be fair. So if someone hasn't heard of Christianity, they can't be held accountable for Christianity. But they will be held accountable for what they do know.

We also know that in Jn. 14.6 Jesus says, "No one comes to the Father except through me." I don't downplay that at all. C.S. Lewis said, "Here is another thing that used to puzzle me. Is it not frightfully unfair that this should be confined to people who have heard of Christ and have been able to believe in him? But the truth is God has not told us what his arrangements about the other people are. We do know that no man can be saved except through Christ; we do not know that only those who know Him can be saved through Him. But in the meantime, if you are worried about the people outside, the most unreasonable thing you can do is to remain outside yourself. ... If you want to help those outside you must add your own little cell to the body of Christ who alone can help them. Cutting off a man's fingers would be an odd way of getting him to do more work. ..."