Board index ‹ Heaven and Hell

[Newbie]

If salvation is through faith alone, and asking Jesus as your savior, do people who have never heard of Jesus go to hell, or at least cannot attain heaven?

[jimwalton]

Not necessarily. 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.

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 wisely said: "We do know that no person can be saved except through Christ; we do not know that only those who know Him can be saved by Him."