Ask Steve:
Do non-Christians go to hell?
"I grew up believing that only those who have
given their lives to Christ will be saved. My
closest work colleague is a Muslim. I used to
think that all Muslims were potential terrorists,
but he’s completely changed my mind. He’s
the most honest, gentle, caring, faith-filled,
respectful, person I know. Surely God won’t
condemn him for eternity?"
The issue you raise is an enormous one. Someone else put the same question to me this way: ‘Isn’t the whole heaven or hell thing a kind of giant postcode lottery? Aren’t most Christians only Christians because they were born in a country with a Christian tradition?’
For centuries, both Protestants and Catholics held the view that there is no salvation outside the Church. Without an explicit knowledge of Christ, salvation is impossible.
European culture was seen as normative and ultimate – which tended to foster both an air of superiority towards all other religions and non-European cultures. It was only the development of fast and safe world travel, in the second half of the 20th century, which finally began to change things. People living thousands of miles away were no longer distant, unknowable groups, but neighbours.
Easy travel also led to huge levels of economic migration. In the 1950s the UK witnessed the arrival of large immigrant populations from Asia, the Caribbean and Africa with a consequence that foreign cultures were no longer ‘over there’, but instead ‘over here’. These days people around the globe are more connected than ever.
The religious ramifications of all this have been huge. On one hand, it has become increasingly difficult to believe that the rest of the world’s citizens are ignorant ‘savages’, as our imperial past had suggested. On the other, we’ve realised that the former insularity of so much Western Christianity failed to do justice to the humility, devotion and longing for fellowship with God that is present in some other religions.
Because God is present in the whole world, his grace is at work everywhere, and can therefore be encountered outside the Church, in every country, among all peoples, in all cultures and possibly even through their religious structures.
When Jesus announced himself as ‘the way, the truth and the life’, his claim was exclusive. He did not suggest that he was ‘one of various possible options’. ‘No one comes to the Father except through me,’ he continued. However, Jesus said nothing about the need for conscious recognition or acceptance of this fact as a condition of its validity, on the part of every beneficiary. In that case, those of other religions might be saved, but this, as for all humanity, is uniquely through Christ. There is no other way.
Whatever else, Jesus was clear that the last day will be a day of surprises and reversals. In his most developed parable of the last judgement – the parable of the sheep and the goats – both the saved and the unsaved are astonished. The grace of God is unreachably beyond our attempts to press it into predictable patterns.
The Christian tradition has always affirmed that there is some provisional knowledge of God in all humankind – all are made in the image of God. For instance, why did Jesus commend the faith of the Gentiles if that faith did not matter at all? Or why did Paul build from, rather than ignore, the worship of the ‘unknown God’ when he dealt with the people in Athens in Acts 17?
God, alongside the most solemn warnings about our responsibility to respond to the gospel, has not revealed how he will deal with those who have never heard it. And, when somebody asked Jesus, ‘Lord, are only a few people going to be saved?’ he refused to answer but instead urged them to enter through the narrow door (Luke 13:23-24).
In the end, the final judge of all this is the God of infinite mercy and justice – no one else. Which means that Abraham’s ancient statement, ‘will not the Judge of all the earth do right?’ (Genesis 18:25) should give us confidence too.
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