Strategies for Dealing with Doubt

A general tasked with defeating a powerful enemy army. An overweight person making a New Year’s resolution to drop 30 pounds. A student during finals week. What do these people have in common? Among other things, all three could benefit from coming up with plan, a strategy. Each of them faces some obstacle, and there are things each can do to give themselves the best chance of overcoming those obstacles. 

Doubt is an obstacle to Christian faith. Like an enemy army, weight loss, or finals, there are things we can do to help create a context for overcoming the obstacle of doubt. To that end, I wish to offer a few strategies here. Elsewhere, I addressed some ways we might be sabotaging ourselves in relation to doubt. That reflection was more of a diagnostic tool, a self-checkup if you will. If you haven’t read it, I encourage you to do so before continuing. Here, I want to take the offensive. Let’s get started. 

To one who struggles with doubt, I suggest that as a first step, you find one or two Christian friends you feel comfortable talking about it with. You never know, maybe one or both of them have also walked through that valley. I had a few people I confided in when I struggled badly with doubt, and the conversations I had with them helped me. One of those friends had also struggled. Sometimes it’s nice to know you’re not the only one, you know? For the most part, it wasn’t really answers to intellectual challenges that I found most helpful about these conversations. It was this—talking with them helped to diffuse some of my distress. Burdens are easier to bear when you’ve got a buddy or two helping you.

The second thing I’d advise is to keep doing the things a Christian normally does, even if it doesn’t feel right. Go to church. Pray. Worship. Read the Bible. God uses these things to grow and transform us. Part of that growth and transformation might include your journey out of doubt. 

I’ve talked before about the importance of imbibing Christian truth. God’s truth helps us properly make sense of everything else we imbibe. This is one reason why it’s important to read the Bible. I know that when you’re struggling with doubt, reading the Bible can be stressful because it reminds you of your predicament, but don’t stop. Especially if you haven’t stopped reading other books, watching movies or TV, playing video games, or whatever. Toward this end, you can also read Christian books (other than the Bible)—both apologetics books and books about other topics—and listen to good Christian podcasts, watching videos, etc. The bottom line is this: Make sure to keep the truths of Scripture constantly before your mind’s eye so that you can properly interpret everything else you see. Otherwise, you will drift, and probably not in the direction of belief. 

A third step might be dealing with persistent sin issues. Sin and doubt have a strong relationship, as I’ve talked about before. Sin has a subtle way of making unbelief convenient, and this can happen without your consciously knowing it. If you’re struggling with doubt, you might be less motivated than ever to put a stop to sinful practices, but take it on faith (no pun intended)—it might just be that by letting go of that grudge, by running away from pornography, by saying “No” to the bottle, or whatever it might be, you are helping to put an end to your doubt, too. 

The last thing I’ll say is this: Don’t give up. Keep seeking answers. They are there. I’ve found many of them myself. But more important than continuing to seek answers, keep chasing after God. Most of the strategies above help toward that end. Scripture promises that if we draw near to God, He will draw near to us (James 4:8). So keep following the sound of His voice, even though you may not see Him through the fog. I think that after some number of weeks or months have passed, the mists will start clearing, and before long, you’ll find that He’s led you into much more pleasant country.

Alignment Issues: Non-Intellectual Reasons For Doubt

Cars have a very specific purpose—to get us from point A to point B. All the nuts, bolts, gears, and switches are there to make sure that we get to our destinations both safely and comfortably. If you’ve taken your car to the dealership or any other shop, then you know that any number of issues can plague our vehicles at any moment and keep them from operating at full capacity, often without our even knowing about it. Maybe the tires are out of alignment. Maybe the car won’t start because the battery is hosed. Maybe you need an oil change (although let’s be honest—has anyone really ever walked away from the auto shop having paid for just an oil change?). 

People bear a certain similarity to cars. Our Maker has imbued us with purpose. He created our various faculties to have particular functions. Like cars that run on gasoline as opposed to diesel, He fashioned us such that we operate maximally with certain inputs rather than others. When we use our faculties in ways God didn’t create them for, we experience dysfunction. When we listen to and absorb messages deep into our hearts that stand in opposition to God’s truth, we experience dysfunction.

One of the effects of such dysfunction is doubt. Like a car plagued with various issues, we sputter and scrape along, and wonder whether or not our Christianity is all it’s cracked up to be. I’m not talking about intellectual questions (like, “Why do bad things happen to good people,” or “Doesn’t science do away with the need for God?”), although such intellectual questions often work alongside dysfunction to create doubt in the Christian. I’m talking about living out of alignment with how God designed the human to function. Elsewhere, I talk about some strategies for dealing with doubt, many of which speak directly to issues of dysfunction. My purpose here, however, is mostly diagnostic. Let’s dive in.

One particularly nasty cause of doubt is unmet expectations. Unmet expectations can lead to cynicism. There’s nothing like cynicism when it comes to sowing seeds of doubt. Maybe we’ve been expecting things of the Christian life that don’t align with what the Bible actually promises, things like health, wealth, or unmitigated happiness. God doesn’t promise these things to His children, not in this life. It’s true that righteous living in general results in blessing, but we cannot forget that we live in a spiritual war. And the battleground for this war is a world marred by sin. God’s children suffer throughout the pages of Scripture—David (just read the Psalms), Jeremiah, Elijah, Paul and most of the other apostles, even Jesus Himself, just to name a few. As Jesus said, “In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world” (John 16:33). So we should actually expect trouble in this world. But we should not lose heart, because our Lord has overcome the world.

It’s also possible that we’re getting the wrong inputs. In other words, we’re listening too much to the wrong people. How much time do we spend reading from Scripture every week? Do we go to church regularly? Do we have friends who regularly speak the truth into our lives, or do most of our friends not care? What messages do we absorb from the novels we read, or the movies, shows, or anime we watch, or the games we play? I’m not saying it’s wrong to like those things; I do. But do we imbibe enough truth such that we can properly make sense of the other things we read, watch, or play? The world constantly presents to us lifestyles contrary to God’s design as if they are normal, and if we forget God’s design, we’ll start to think they are normal too.

Finally, and I’ll spend a bit more time on this one, maybe our lifestyles—our thoughts, habits, attitudes, etc.—do not line up with how God designed the human machine to run. He has given us things to avoid in Scripture: greed, sexual immorality, adultery, drunkenness, to name a few. Some of these alignment issues are simply mis-uses of good gifts that God has given us to enjoy. Take sex, for example. God made sex what it is, but we know from Scripture that He designed it to be enjoyed between a man and a woman who are married to each other. Outside this context, sex is like fire outside the fireplace. Likewise, intemperate enjoyment of alcohol can turn into alcoholism and just destroy, destroy, destroy. It’s happened over and over again.

Living out of alignment with God’s ethical design for the human does two things to us. First, it makes life suck. Pardon the crass language, but I speak the truth. What I say bears especially upon Spirit-indwelt Christians. As Christians, we cannot embrace compromise and it not rip us to shreds on the inside. We just can’t. And when life sucks, it’s easy to become jaded and cynical.

Second, living in moral mis-alignment warps our desires, and makes us want things we shouldn’t. After a while, we may even come to consider those warped desires as natural. When we desire things contrary to the life of belief, unbelief becomes convenient. This can operate at a subconscious level. We may sincerely deny a connection between our doubts and moral misalignment we allow, but that misalignment may be pushing us in the direction of unbelief without us even knowing it.

This combination of “life sucks” cynicism and warped desires can lead us to conclude that our Christianity “just ain’t doing it for us.” But a Christian life riddled with compromise isn’t really the Christian life as it is supposed to be, so is it any wonder that we can end up in such places?

What can we do in the face of such things? First and foremost, we must remember that our God is the master mechanic who “creates new hearts within us” and “sustains us with willing spirits” (Psalm 51). No brokenness lies beyond His healing powers. I’ll talk about some concrete strategies for dealing with doubt elsewhere, much of which pertains to what I’ve explored here, but always remember this: There is no manner or amount of misalignment that our God cannot fix.

Do the Old and New Testaments Tell the Same Story? Part 2

Have you ever looked at one of those optical illusions with the hidden images? Those pictures where, when you first look at one, all you see is a pattern of shapes and colors. But after you’ve stared at it for long enough, all of a sudden an image emerges. A face, a horse, or whatever. The place of the Jewish people in redemptive history was kind of like that for me. I had this picture of history in mind (history from a Christian perspective) and I kind of understood where the Jewish people fit in, but not entirely. 

You see, God makes a promise to Abraham in Genesis 12:3: “All peoples on earth will be blessed through you.” How will the peoples of the earth be blessed through Abraham? The classic Christian answer to this question is Jesus Christ (a descendant of Abraham). I wholeheartedly agree with and affirm the truth of this answer. Hands down, the biggest way God has blessed the nations through Abraham has been through the provision of His Son. But during a personal period of doubt, that answer seemed a bit trite to me. It took coming through to the other side of the valley of the shadow of doubt for me to really buy into that answer again. During my time in the valley, however, I stumbled across some other ways God fulfilled (or will fulfill) His promise to Abraham. These discoveries were much like signposts (among other signposts) that pointed me toward the way out. I want to talk about some of these things here.

Throughout history, the Jewish people had been God’s primary vehicle of revelation to the world. Jews wrote (or at least compiled) the entirety of the Christian Old Testament (the Jewish Tanakh). Because of the Old Testament, we know without question that sin is wrong. The sacrifices prescribed by the Law gave the Jews, and all who fell under their influence, the important idea of atoning sacrifice, and prepared the way for the ultimate sacrifice yet-to-come—that of Jesus Christ upon the cross.

Contrary to what some Christians might think, one cannot properly understand the New Testament apart from the Old. Even most of the New Testament was written by—you guessed it—Jews. Christianity is rooted in a very Jewish worldview. The New Testament teaches us about Jesus, the coming of the Spirit, and the Church. It gives us a new way to live. All this not to mention the Father’s ultimate revelation of Himself in Jesus.

God used the Jewish worldview, based on His revelation in Scripture, to prepare the ancient Western world for the gospel. He did this in a couple of different ways. First, Israel is situated in the crux of the African-Eurasian supercontinent. It’s kind of the center of the world. Its central location is conducive for maximum global influence. Second, the Jewish people experienced displacements, or diasporas, during the eras of Assyrian and Babylonian domination, ensuring that Jewish people lived in places relatively far-flung from the homeland. By the time of early imperial Rome, a traveler could find Jewish synagogues scattered throughout the Mediterranean world, along with a handful of God-fearers, non-Jews who had adopted a monotheistic, Jewish worldview. God used these two circumstances to prepare the ancient West for the coming of His Son.

From Constantine until quite recently, the (decidedly Jewish) Christian worldview dominated the Western mindset. Now, some pretty horrible things came out of the Christian West; the crusades, Catholic-Protestant warring, and the African slave trade, to name a few. But some pretty great things came out of the Christian West too. Leaps forward as regards human rights and freedoms, unprecedented innovation and codification of the artistic disciplines, and great advances in learning which led to the rise of modern science and medicine.

I believe the single biggest reason for this flourishing is Christianity—a worldview which disposed its adherents to affirm the dignity and creativity of humanity as the Imago Dei (the image of God), and to expect their world to exhibit the kind of orderliness and design that would evince a Grand Designer. And it was God’s dealings with the Jewish people in the Old Testament and His creation of a new covenant community in the New that made all of this possible.

Finally, according to my understanding of Scripture, Jesus will return, restore Israel to glory (and give her a glory she has never known), and reign over the earth from Jerusalem for a thousand years before the beginning of the eternal state. All Christians believe that Jesus will return, but not all believe that He will reign on earth for a thousand years. But many of us do. I think His reign will be the culmination of all human society prior to the eternal state. It will be a Jewish monarchy, and a true theocracy. If this interpretation of Scripture is correct, then not only will the Jewish people have been God’s vehicles of revelation and human cultural flourishing, but the culmination of all human society will be Jewish.

All this finds its ultimate expression in the biggest way God has blessed the peoples of the world through Abraham—His provision of the Lamb who takes away the sin of the world. Truly, God has used the Jewish people to bless humanity. In so many ways.

Do the Old and New Testaments Tell the Same Story? Part 1

I’m a sucker for a good story. Doesn’t matter whether it’s a novel, a movie, a TV show, or a video game. A skillfully crafted story, with its carefully paced plot-lines in which every major character and event has a narrative role, can really take my breath away. The defeat of the empire and Darth Vader’s redemption at the end of Return of the Jedi…so satisfying. Avatar: The Last Airbender bewitched me and wouldn’t let me go until Aang finally defeated the Firelord and got the girl. And I’ll never get over the rush of storming the citadel with my team as Commander Shepard at the end of Mass Effect. 

Epic stories like these leave me thinking, “Man, I wish my life were that epic.” Or, more specifically: “Man, I wish all the circumstances of my life were directed towards such a meaningful and noble end.” And yes, it would also be cool to be a Jedi, or an Airbender, or a boss space marine like Shepard. I’d be willing to bet that most of us find the idea of our lives being linked to some epic story attractive.

The Christian scriptures, as it happens, claim to tell just such a story. There was a time, however, when I struggled pretty badly over the question of whether the Bible was telling just one story, or two or more. The apparent disconnect between the Old and New Testaments particularly bothered me. It seemed like on the whole, the Old Testament concerned itself with the national and religious affairs of Israel, while the New Testament focused on the multi-ethnic community of Jesus-followers, the Church. This led me to doubt the integrity and truth of the entire narrative. A story about the redemption of humankind seemed like one I wanted to be part of, but why does so much of this story focus on Israel? Did the Bible start out as just a collection of Jewish writings and only much later spawn a sort of pseudo-Jewish community based on the teachings of Jesus?

As my thinking has matured, I’ve come to see more and more that the two testaments are, in fact, telling the same story, and that’s what I’d like to talk about here. If you’ve ever struggled with this question, I hope the following thoughts will be helpful to you. At the least, it’s interesting stuff to think about.

It seems to me like the overarching story of the whole Bible centers around humanity’s fall into sin and God’s great and merciful campaign to redeem it. This is clearly the focus of the New Testament. But go back and read through the first 11 chapters of Genesis, the first of the books of Moses. The first 11 chapters of Genesis primarily concern themselves with cosmic issues, issues that are pertinent to all humanity. Most good stories have a scene near the beginning where something goes terribly wrong, a scene that sets up the conflict that carries the characters through the rest of the story toward the final resolution. That’s exactly what we find in Genesis. Chapter three introduces us to the main problem: humanity’s first parents fall into sin, and henceforth sin’s taint and the Curse will afflict all their progeny. This first part of Genesis shows us that humanity’s rebellion against God has brought about the suffering and death that we all experience. It also hints at God’s plan for redeeming the humans: a descendant of the woman will engage in a struggle against the offspring of the serpent who deceived her (the serpent is generally thought to be Satan, the enemy of God and His followers). The serpent will grievously wound the descendant of the woman, but in the end, the man will emerge victorious.

At the end of Genesis 11, the scope of the narrative narrows and focuses on the national and religious concerns of the children of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—the Jewish people—and remains there for most of the rest of the Old Testament. The creation of the Jewish nation and the Old Testament’s focus on national concerns is a very important part of the story of God’s redemption for humankind, for some pretty big reasons. In fact, I think it merits its own discussion.

Even amidst these Jewish-centered concerns that saturate most of the Old Testament, we find reminders that God’s ultimate purpose is the redemption of all humanity. Consider these words spoken by King Solomon at the dedication of the temple:

“As for the foreigner who does not belong to your people Israel but has come from a distant land because of your name—for they will hear of your great name and your mighty hand and your outstretched arm—when they come and pray toward this temple, then hear from heaven, your dwelling place. Do whatever the foreigner asks of you, so that all the peoples of the earth may know your name and fear you, as do your own people Israel, and may know that this house I have built bears your Name” (1 Kings 8:41-43, NIV).

Or consider these words, also about the temple, spoken by God through the prophet Isaiah:

And foreigners who bind themselves to the Lord

    to minister to him,

to love the name of the Lord,

    and to be his servants,

all who keep the Sabbath without desecrating it

    and who hold fast to my covenant—

these I will bring to my holy mountain

    and give them joy in my house of prayer.

Their burnt offerings and sacrifices

    will be accepted on my altar;

for my house will be called

    a house of prayer for all nations.

Or listen to God’s words here, also in Isaiah, about the “Servant of the LORD,” whom I take to be a reference to the then-coming anointed one, Jesus:

It is too small a thing for you to be my servant

    to restore the tribes of Jacob

    and bring back those of Israel I have kept.

I will also make you a light for the Gentiles,

    that my salvation may reach to the ends of the earth.

Should we expect to find such content in the Old Testament if it were simply a collection of Jewish texts about Jewish people? Wouldn’t it focus only on Jewish interests and national advancement, especially in the dog-eat-dog world of the ancient near east? I’m no expert, but I bet you’d have a hard time finding anything very similar to this sort of concern for the nations in ancient Babylonian, Akkadian, and Persian literature. At any rate, it appears that the God of Israel expresses a degree concern for all peoples everywhere, even in parts of the Old Testament that are primarily concerned with the Jewish nation. 

This fits nicely with the cosmic issues of sin and redemption that we find in the first 11 chapters of Genesis. But that still leaves us with a question: Why Israel? More on this next time.

If you're curious and want more, check out Dallas Seminary's course The Story of Scripture. I was able to write some of what I wrote above (and in my next reflection) because I took this course. 

Genocide in the Old Testament

“The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”

— Richard Dawkins

Wow. What is Dawkins’ problem with God? He apparently has many, but I’d bet that a number of these descriptors—unjust, vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser, infanticidal, genocidal—are aimed at God’s acts of judgment in the Old Testament against various people groups. Some of these judgments involved total annihilation. I think of the flood, Sodom and Gomorrah, God’s command that the Israelites wipe out the Canaanites during the conquest, and the slaughter of the Amalekites. Multiple noteworthy Christian apologists have given excellent answers to this challenge and some of what I say below reflects their thinking. Because this is a frequently-rehearsed objection to the Christian faith, I want to spend some time on the issue here. 

I think the big problem here is with the idea of “innocent” people dying. Before moving on, let me note that there are two kinds of innocence. First, there is legal or ethical innocence relative to particular crimes. Different people are guilty or innocent relative to different crimes. Most people you and I meet on a daily basis are innocent of the crime of murder, but most have probably lied at some point. Second, there is general innocence, or sinlessness. Only one human being to have ever walked the earth is and remains innocent and sinless—Jesus. 

It’s this second kind of innocence that is important here. Scripture teaches that all have sinned, and that the wages of sin is death. That being said, it is perfectly just for God—the ultimate Judge—to demand the life of any unjustified sinner at any time. We are all sinners, so we all die. God is perfectly justified in deciding that any person’s death come sooner rather than later. Personally, I think it’s a mercy of God that any of us live for any length of time on this earth. That’s a sobering thought, and I think it’s an indication that the human story is much, much darker than we think about most of the time.

Now, the fact that no one is really innocent doesn’t give we humans justification to go around murdering each other. God is the ultimate Judge. People in general do not have much moral high ground over other people. I do believe there are contexts in which killing is justified—defense, for example. This would include self-defense and defense of others on both a small scale (e.g., thwarting a terrorist attack), and a large scale (war). Even capital punishment involves an element of defense (e.g., protecting society from murderers, rapists, etc.), although such crimes that usually merit capital punishment can justly involve a punitive element as well.

But aside from the fact that no one is really innocent, we must remember that the inhabitants of the earth before the flood, the residents of Sodom and Gomorrah, and the Canaanites were all characterized by abominable, almost unimaginably perverse evil. Old Testament scholar Walter Kaiser, referring in particular to the Canaanites, sums up their perversion and its consequences well: “They were cut off to prevent Israel and the rest of the world from being corrupted (Deut. 20:16-18). When a people starts to burn their children in honor of their gods (Lev. 18:21), practice sodomy, bestiality, and all sorts of loathsome vices (Lev. 18:23,24; 20:3), the land itself begins to ‘vomit’ them out as the body heaves under the load of internal poisons (Lev. 18:25,27-30)” (From Ron Rhodes, Answering the Objections of Atheists, Agnostics, and Skeptics [Harvest House Publishers, 2006], 254).

Canaanite society had fallen to such depths of perversion that the land itself “vomited” them out. We who live in more developed societies have difficulty visualizing this kind of corporate corruption. This is probably particularly true of those of us who live in the West, where our moral sensibilities and those of our ancestors have been shaped and restrained by biblical principles for centuries. But some places in the world lack the moral restraint that more developed societies enjoy. I went to a missions conference once, and I remember the speaker describing the evil he was exposed to during his time as a missionary in Somalia. But you know what? Even Somalia can’t hold a candle to ancient Canaanite society. If you want to get an idea of the kinds of evil that could possibly warrant the annihilation of an entire culture, watch Mel Gibson’s movie Apocalypto.

What about infants and young children in such a society? Surely such innocents don’t deserve the same fate as their older and more corrupt kin. Admittedly, this is a more difficult question. The concept of an “age of accountability” will help us here. For our purposes, let’s say that every child has an “age of accountability,” and that God will not hold any child morally accountable who hasn’t yet reached this age. Personally, I believe this is true, and that infants and children under this age go straight to heaven when they die. So it could be that by ordering the annihilation of the entire Canaanite civilization, God providentially spared the infants and young children what almost certainly would have been their eventual fate—participation in their culture’s extreme moral decadence and eternal condemnation. The same would apply for infants and young children living the pre-flood cultures and in Sodom and Gomorrah.

What about children beyond the age of accountability? It’s possible that such children, though young, were already old enough to participate fully in their culture’s extreme depravity. Or perhaps their culture had so seeded their hearts with corruption that they were destined to experience an eventual blossoming into full participation in their culture’s depravity. Hence, dying young may have secured them a less-severe punishment in the afterlife. Dark, I know. But perhaps helpful.

It bears mentioning that God gave the Canaanites, pre-flood humans, and even the residents of Sodom and Gomorrah hundreds of years to repent. God is patient, and He wants all people to turn to Him.

One final point. We know it is morally wrong in most circumstances for us to take another human life. But I don’t think we can say the same thing about God. I think it’s probably fair to say that God—the Giver of life—can rightfully take it away. I believe that for the most part, He desires for His creatures to live, and to live to the fullest. But sometimes He deems it right that life must be taken, and He is perfectly just to do so. And so God decided that the Amalekites—a people who had threatened His chosen nation and hence the plan of salvation on multiple occasions—must be wiped out. As a side note, the Amalekites and the Canaanites were sort of neighbors, so one might reasonably assume that some of the Canaanites’ corruption had rubbed off on the Amalekites, thus increasing the warrant for their destruction. 

I realize this is all pretty heavy. As I mentioned earlier, I think the human story has some much darker threads than we sometimes allow ourselves to acknowledge. The corruption of sin is dark, dark, dark, and apparently some groups of people in the past so heavily embraced or sided with the darkness that they needed to be excised like cancerous tumors.

But thank goodness there is light too, and it shines with an infinite brightness that makes the darkness like nothing. “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16). Through faith in Christ, God delivers repentant sinners from the bonds of darkness and the consequences of their sin into light eternal. This is good news. The best news.

The Profundity of the Human Experience

“How are we able to experience such profound pain? How am I able to fall in love with a piece of music and so deeply appreciate its melodies and harmonies? Why am I so terrified—offended even—at the thought that the universe, and my life, have no meaning?”

I wrote words very similar to this in a journal once, during a time of enormous struggle with doubt. I wanted badly to believe in and affirm the Christian narrative, but I wasn’t completely sure I could. Later, my collection of anchors grew, but at the time, I didn’t feel like I had a lot to hold onto. However, there was a very small handful of things I couldn’t doubt. One of those was the profundity of my own experiences as a human being. Despair over personal failures, the longing to love and be loved, a craving for significance and adventure—all these things rent me and touched the very depths of my soul. Particular scenes or images left (and still do leave) deep impressions on me. Shafts of golden light breaking through the green ceiling and falling to the forest floor. A family at peace gathered around the fireplace, the love in each person’s heart as warm as the embers glowing in the hearth. Sorry, I don’t mean to go all poetic on you, but these kinds of things stir up feelings that I can’t always easily explain. And when I was really struggling with doubt, none of this seemed to make sense to me under the assumption that we live in a cold, mechanistic universe. 

I want to look quickly at some of these things that make human life so profound, and that, I think, point to God. Particularly, I want to talk about beauty, the need for significance, and morality. Let’s start with beauty.

I’ll repeat my question from the beginning: why does music move me so? How is it that sounds of string, wind, and percussion instruments played together at different pitches and levels of loudness can combine into textures that make my heart melt with tenderness or lurch in sorrow? Why does John Williams’s theme from Hook make me feel like I’m flying? Words on a page, hues and textures on a canvas, lighting and camera angles on film can all produce similar experiences. Why?

Sure, we could probably come up with some naturalistic explanation for how our capacity to appreciate beautiful things enhances our survivability or something, but the connection between that end and those means is far from straightforward. I feel like any such explanation will necessarily involve a degree of rational gymnastics and will prove, in the end, to be somewhat convoluted. I’m not saying a naturalistic explanation is impossible, but is it really the best answer?

Let’s shift gears and talk about our need for significance. Why do we all have such a desperate need for our lives to mean something? To make something of the world around us in a way that impacts others? Are our desires for significance just the highly evolved trappings of an underlying drive to pass on our genes? That doesn’t seem right. “Meaning” and “propagation of genes” don’t appear to me to be the same thing.

So where does this idea of “meaning” come from in the first place? Might I suggest that we have these desires because a God of meaning, who fashioned us after His image and likeness, put them there? I’m hardly the first person to feel this way:

“If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning” (C.S. Lewis, in Mere Christianity). 

Finally, let’s talk about morality. It’s perhaps a bit more reasonable to think that morality might have arisen via naturalistic processes as a way to keep us from harming and killing each other, lest we bring ourselves to extinction through violence. After all, most moral decisions happen within interpersonal contexts. Not all of them do, at least in a straightforward manner. Take, for example, the idea we often find in ourselves that certain places or things are holy or sacred. Sure, such an idea might be a developmental quirk, or an amalgamation of smaller, more survival-oriented mental constructs, but that’s just a guess.

But do you want to know the thing that really gets me about morality? It’s this question—why “right” and “wrong,” as opposed to something that would make more sense in a mechanistic world, like “more conducive to survival” and “less conducive to survival”? Why specifically right and wrong? These words imply objectivity as regards moral standards, and that we will be held accountable for our misdeeds. They imply that there is some ultimate norming norm that we violate, some perfect moral Being whom we offend, when we do wrong. And most people in history have more or less felt this way. I think that means something. 

Here’s the bottom line: When I look inside myself, I see desires and profound experiences that just don’t seem to make sense in a meaningless, naturalistic universe. The things inside me are like puzzle pieces in an incomplete picture of who I am. Deep down, something inside me knows that other pieces are out there that perfectly match the grooves of my soul. The puzzle pieces from the naturalistic account of the universe sort of fit in some places, but they just really don’t in others. The pieces from the Christian account? Those fit much, much better.

The Problem of Evil, Part 3

I took a creative writing class one time in grad school. Each week, the professor gave us a one-word prompt and we would write a short piece. We could write about anything we wanted, as long as it had something to do with that word. One week, the word was “web.” I started thinking about that word and it occurred to me that the circumstances of our lives resemble webs. Really big webs. Every little thing connects to every other, every decision, every conversation, every seeming coincidence. Even the bad things—the tragedies, heartbreaks, and even our worst failures. Somehow God weaves all of this together into His master plan. That’s what I want to wrestle with here. 

I have previously attempted to show that evil and suffering cannot be used to prove that the Christian worldview is logically incoherent. I have also proposed that the joy and wonder that our free will makes possible (particularly when fully realized in the eternal state) is a very likely reason why God decided that a universe with evil was worth it. Even so, the consideration of evil and suffering—especially the evil and suffering in our own experience—is still fraught with tension. Thinking about God as the sovereign “master Weaver” in relation to the evils of our world helps release some of that tension.

I have argued elsewhere that God knows every possible combination of states of affairs, including how free creatures could, and even would, act and react in every situation. Or, to put it a bit differently, God knows how things could and would go down in any and every imaginable permutation of the world. Armed with this knowledge, He has selected, or actualized, one that is optimal.

If you think about it, this could have huge implications for the problem of evil. God might have minimized, or mitigated, the amount of evil that His free creatures would have to suffer by selecting the world that He did. He also might have been able to repurpose as much of that evil as possible for good. This is similar to Leibniz’s idea that our world is the “best of all possible worlds.” In the face of our world’s great evils (especially the really horrendous ones) a claim such as this could seem ludicrous and even depressing, but I think these kinds of ideas are worth considering. Let me give you a hypothetical example to illustrate the sort of thing I’m thinking about.

Say you come down with a bad cold on Monday. On Tuesday, your good friend Jessica drops by your apartment with a care package with cookies, lemon-flavored lozenges, and of course, chicken soup. Unfortunately, Jessica isn’t careful about washing her hands afterwards, and a couple days later she comes down with the virus. On Friday, she goes to the doctor, who sends her to Walgreens to get some medicine.

Also on Friday, Christopher the pharmacy technician, who normally works Monday through Thursday, gets called into work due to an abnormally large influx of sick patients coming down with this virus, thereby sacrificing the day of lounging by the pool he had planned. Jessica and Christopher, both single, hit it off when Jessica gets to the front of the line.

Several months and pharmacy visits later, Jessica and Christopher exchange phone numbers and go out. Eventually, they marry and start a family. One hundred twenty years later, their great, great, great granddaughter discovers the cure for cancer. All of this happened because you came down with that nasty cold.

Okay maybe that seems a little far-fetched, but think about it. If God has knowledge of all contingencies, who’s to say He hasn’t arranged things thus that cause/effect chains like the one I just described aren’t in the works every single day? A child from the slums of a neighboring city is delivered from poverty because you stubbed your toe. A family of Bedouin nomads in Yemen comes to know Jesus because that relationship didn’t work out. It’s kind of like the movie Back to the Future, but a billion times more complicated. Most of the time, we can’t say for sure whether or not these sorts of things happen, but God’s foreknowledge and sovereignty totally makes it possible.

It’s also worth noting that suffering can serve redemptive purposes at a much more personal level. We all know this. No pain, no gain. If I don’t catch a cold every once in a while, my immune system will grow weak. If I don’t exercise, I will not be healthy. But these sufferings are light and hardly worth the designation. Real suffering can be redemptive too. Someone who has once endured the legal and emotional difficulties of a divorce is in a much better position to comfort others fighting similar battles. A leader who has tasted the bitter consequences of a moral failure will be less quick to compromise in the future. And wasn’t it Thomas Edison who spoke so winsomely about the value of getting something wrong over and over again before finally getting it right (in his case, discovering ten-thousand ways not to make a lightbulb)?

Redemptive suffering is especially pertinent to Christians because we know that our trials are oftentimes directed by the hand of God (Heb. 12:5-11). Suffering also takes us to new depths in our experience and understanding of God’s grace, and the peace which surpasses understanding (Phil. 4:7).

All that said, here me when I say this: Suffering is not inherently good. Death is not good. Divorce is not good. Sin is not good. These things are aberrations, and it would have been better if the need for the kinds of silver linings I’ve been mentioning didn’t exist in the first place. But as long as clouds crowd our skies, wouldn’t you rather the silver linings be there? I would. 

So how do all these things help us? Well, they help us to trust in God by giving us a glimpse into how He might operate in His sovereignty with respect to the troubles of the world. They give us confidence that our specific sufferings might have redemptive purposes, even if we can’t see what those are. They give us reason to have faith, that God-honoring and often difficult “assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (Heb. 11:1). Faith that our Heavenly Father is never surprised at the things that happen to us. Faith that at the end of the day—every day—He has every circumstance under His control. Faith that in the life to come, God will show us the web that connects all the failures and tragedies of our lives—the whole sprawling, awful, beautiful web—and over and over again we will be able to say, “I understand now.”

This may not be the best of all possible worlds. But it is the best way to the best of all possible worlds.

The Problem of Evil, Part 2

On March 11, 2011, a magnitude nine earthquake struck in the waters 231 miles northeast of Tokyo, Japan, creating a tsunami that spawned 30-foot waves. The quake was the largest in recorded history ever to hit Japan, and together with the tsunami, took the lives of over 20,000 people. Popular atheist Sam Harris later remarked, “Either God can do nothing to stop catastrophes like this, or he doesn't care to, or he doesn’t exist. God is either impotent, evil, or imaginary. Take your pick, and choose wisely.”

Harris says that tragedy and an all-good, all-powerful God cannot exist in the same world. You can have one, but not the other. No doubt, the 2011 Japan earthquake was an immense tragedy, and it’s important that we say so. But are such tragedies proof that God doesn’t exist (or alternatively that He is evil, or less-than-all-powerful)? I don’t think so. Elsewhere, I talked about how God might have allowed evil in order to preserve the joy and wonder made possible by our being free creatures. I want to expand on that here, and show how evil actually cannot be used as an automatic defeater for the Christian worldview. 

One of the most interesting recent responses to the problem of evil is Alvin Plantinga’s “free will defense.” The basic idea is this: It’s possible that God could not have created a world in which some optimal number of people maximally experience the joy and wonder of being truly free (let’s call such a world an “optimal world”) without there also being evil. How might this work? First, let me state up front that I’m assuming a couple things. First, I assume that humans have genuine free will. A million factors might influence any given decision, but those factors do not coerce the person into choosing one way or another. Second, I assume that humanity’s free will choice to sin ultimately brings about all evil (including seemingly-arbitrary suffering). 

Okay, with that out of the way, let me articulate how it might be possible that God couldn’t have created an optimal world without allowing evil. Before the creation of our world, the actual world, some astronomically large number of possible worlds existed in the mind of God. Now, it is possible (it’s not self-contradictory or otherwise logically absurd to say) that there was at least one person who would have sinned (and thereby incurred the Genesis 3 curse) in every single one of these worlds (if you like fancy words, Plantinga calls this idea “transworld depravity”). Let me illustrate. Suppose there is some guy who would eventually be born in every possible world named Rumpelstiltskin (I tried to pick an uncommon name, so if you’re reading this and you happen to be named Rumpelstiltskin, I’m terribly sorry). In each and every single one of these worlds, Rumpelstiltskin sins. In some of these worlds, he’s an absolute monster. In others, he’s just a felon. In some, he’s really not that bad of a guy, but he tells a small lie every once in a while. But in every one, he sins and brings about the curse. 

If you don’t buy the idea that any single person could exist in every possible world, that’s fine. We could just as easily say this: It’s possible (it’s not self-contradictory or otherwise logically absurd to say) that there is at least one person in any of the possible worlds who would sin. Even in a world with just two people, there’s a 50-50 chance (from our perspective) that someone would sin. I don’t think two people, even if they both choose against sin, is enough to make up an optimal world. Which is better, two people rejoicing in heaven for eternity, or 20 billion? This actually brings up a great point. We don’t even have to say that Rumpelstiltskin, or some sinner, might exist in all possible worlds. We only have to say that such a person might exist in all optimal worlds. That is a logically possible statement. That is, it’s possible that in all the worlds where an optimal number of people maximally experience the joy and wonder of being truly free, there is at least one person who sins.

The bottom line is that in any of the worlds God would have considered actualizing, it’s at least possible that somebody sins. I happen to think that it’s even probable, given a sufficient number of people in a world. And because of that, it’s possible that God had to allow evil and all its consequences.

Question: Does all of this compromise divine omnipotence? If God is all-powerful, then isn’t it within His power to create a world with free creatures in which none of them choose to reject Him? Well, this might very well be impossible, assuming that God really does just leave some things up to us. If God forced creatures to accept Him who otherwise would have rejected Him, then they are no longer free. To say that God forces free creatures to accept Him is illogical (because free creatures by definition cannot be forced), and God’s omnipotence acts in accordance with logic, because logic finds its source in the very nature of God. So my definition of omnipotence is a little more nuanced than simply saying, “God can do anything.” And that’s okay. 

Harris thinks that such free-will defenses are cases of heaping “bad philosophy onto bad ethics.” Quite frankly, he’s wrong. As I’ve hopefully demonstrated, the existence of evil does not automatically defeat the Christian worldview because it is at least possible that God had to allow evil in order to bring about an optimal world. None of this compromises divine omnipotence. That doesn’t mean a person cannot marshal evil as evidence against the Christian worldview. People do that all the time. Obviously, there’s still tension (and I want to talk about that some here). What all of this does mean, however, is that evil cannot be given as conclusive proof that the Christian worldview is untrue.

The Problem of Evil, Part 1

“Is he willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then is he impotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then is he malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil?”

— David Hume

Let me restate this in more contemporary language. Wouldn’t an all-good God require Himself to eliminate evil as far as possible? And couldn’t an all-powerful God make it happen? Then why is our world so full of evil?

No one is immune from feeling the need to ask these kinds of questions sometimes. I’ve suffered. I bet you have too. To be fair, I’ve brought on a fair amount of my own suffering by acting stupidly, but I can’t say that about every painful experience I’ve ever had. 

And I think for most of us, suffering is what this question is really about. We don’t question God’s goodness or sovereignty when life is a pleasant stroll through the woods. We question God’s goodness or sovereignty when our hearts break and our dreams die, or when we fall victim to someone else’s depravity. When someone you love decides to not love you anymore. When the doctor walks in with a cancer diagnosis.

In this reflection, I want to spend a little time addressing why I think the classic Christian response to the “why evil?” question—that is, the problem of evil is rooted in God’s preservation of our free will—is probably the right one. I'll expand on this idea in a subsequent reflection.

A quick note to suffering people from a fellow sufferer: I think it’s true that when you’re suffering badly, philosophical reflection on the problem of evil may seem hollow, or maybe even offensive. It’s always been sort of the opposite for me. If you are suffering badly, then maybe these thoughts will resonate with you and bless you, but maybe they won’t. I hope they do. If you’re in the valley right now, know that whatever your circumstances, someone has almost certainly tread there before. Maybe even I have! At any rate, you don’t have to walk through it alone. And as the old saying goes, “this too shall pass.”

Now, back to my argument: I’ve noted that the preservation of our free will is the classic reason Christians give for why God allows evil to persist. I will assume here that every kind of evil exists as a result of the curse described in Genesis 3, which fell upon humanity for their rebellion, and upon the earthly domain God had given them to rule over. Accordingly, this includes both human-caused evils (moral evils like murder and adultery; also evils caused by human-imperfection, such as a poorly-designed building collapsing in on the innocent people inside), and non-human-caused evils (also called “natural” evils, such as disease, or any destruction of human life or happiness caused by earthquakes, hurricanes, and other natural disasters). 

So, what is it about free will that makes it worth all the pain and suffering? The merit of the free will explanation hangs on the answer to this question. Allow me to draw upon C.S. Lewis’s keen insights here:

Why, then, did God give them free will? Because free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having…. The happiness which God designs for His higher creatures is the happiness of being freely, voluntarily united to Him and to each other in an ecstasy of love and delight compared with which the most rapturous love between a man and a woman on this earth is mere milk and water. And for that they must be free. (C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity [San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 2001], p. 48) 

I think Lewis really nailed it here. I’m not a married guy (not yet, anyway), but if or when that changes, I want my wife to want to be with me, to choose me just as much as I choose her. And I’m willing to bet most people feel the same way about their relationships and marriages. I think we can all agree that the words “I love you” just don’t mean anything if spoken by force or compulsion. 

Here’s another example. I love to make up stories, and would love to write a novel someday. I make up stories because it’s fun and I want to. But it probably wouldn’t be as fun if I had no choice, if somebody forced me to do it. Something inside would me would cry out in rebellion against whoever was forcing me to write. 

As Lewis intimates—and this is important for our use of free will as an answer to the “why evil?” question—the truest and fullest benefits of our being free creatures are yet future. In the present life, we experience enough suffering to make us wonder whether or not it’s all worth it. But in the new creation, we’ll experience an “ecstasy” in our activities, and more importantly, in our relationships with God and others. This perpetual state of ecstasy will explode our present categories. This is something to look forward to.

David Hume mocks this delayed gratification idea in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, and I’m sure many others have too. To be fair, if you reject the idea of an afterlife, this will be of little use or comfort to you. But allow me to push back. If you do believe in an afterlife, and particularly if you believe you will spend eternity with Christ in a restored creation, then this is huge. The Bible talks a lot about the hope of the Christ-follower, and I believe a lot of that hope finds its basis in the promise of a restored creation: 

“Look! God’s dwelling is with humanity, and He will live with them. They will be His people, and God Himself will be with them and be their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes. Death will no longer exist; grief, crying, and pain will exist no longer, because the previous things have passed away” (Revelation 21:3b-4, HCSB).

The wonder and happiness that free will ultimately makes possible, particularly when it finds its fullest and most blissful realization in the restored creation, gives us the “greater good” that will make all the pain and suffering of this life worth it. For this reason, I am convinced that free will works as an answer to the “why evil?” question.

Those Who Have Never Heard, Part 3: Divine Foreknowledge

Let’s take a few moments to talk about predestination versus free will. Just kidding. Well, sort of. As you know, this question comes up a lot, especially as related to the issue of personal salvation. In high school, the teacher in one of my Bible courses once divided the class in two and actually had us engage in a debate on the issue. I don’t remember which side won. 

If you’re like me, you’re maybe a little tired of the question. However, a little bit of serious thinking about divine foreknowledge and predestination can really help us with a different question, the one I’ll be considering in this reflection—the question of the fate of “those who have never heard” the gospel. In a previous reflection, I set the stage for our consideration of this question by talking about the three main ways people typically approach the question of who will and who will not be saved (exclusivism, universalism, and inclusivism). In another reflection, I discussed a couple of frequently-overlooked circumstances (population growth and infant mortality) that—in my humble opinion—greatly curtail the severity of the problems created by the “those who have never heard” question. If you haven’t read those, I encourage you to do so now.

Here, I want to discuss a particular perspective on God’s foreknowledge and predestination that may entirely eliminate the problems associated with the question of “those who have never heard.” An article written by Christian philosopher William Lane Craig first introduced me to this approach. In fact, in much of what follows I will attempt to lay out in plain terms some of the material Craig presented in his article.

According to Craig, God knows how every single person would respond to Him under any possible set of circumstances. With this knowledge, God has thus ordered the world in such a way that any person who never hears the gospel during earthly life would—in fact—have rejected iteven if he or she had heard the gospel. 

If that just flew right over your head, don’t worry. I think everything will become more clear as we consider some details. Just put on your thinking cap and hang with me for a bit, okay? 

We can think about God’s knowledge in three stages. 

Stages one and two describe God’s “thought process” regarding how to arrange things (or, in more philosophical terms, which world to actualize). In the first stage, God envisions every possible combination of various states of affairs, including any possible decision that any free creature could (but not necessarily would) make in any of those circumstances. In other words, God, in the infinite vastness of His intellect, visualizes all at once how things could play out in any logically possible world. 

Remember Bob the Mayan from my previous reflection? Let’s revisit Bob for a moment, and, for the sake of illustration, address one of the countless factors God might consider in deciding which world to actualize. In stage one of God’s thought process, He sees all the worlds in which Bob only keeps cats as pets, all the worlds in which he only keeps dogs, and every possible world in between. God sees all the worlds in which Bob has no pets. God is even able to see worlds in which Bob has a pathological fear of cats (and would never, under any circumstances whatsoever, adopt one) but still chooses to keep cats anyway. Such worlds may not actually be feasible, but they are logically possible. 

In the second stage, God narrows down His knowledge from stage one and envisions what states of affairs would actually lead to any other, including what any free creature would actually choose under any possible set of circumstances. God’s knowledge in this middle stage is called “middle knowledge.” (The philosophical position associated with “middle knowledge” was pioneered by 16th century Jesuit thinker Luis de Molina, and is often called Molinism.) Armed with this additional knowledge, God winnows down His initial list of possible worlds into a set of actually feasible worlds that takes human free-will into account. This means that all worlds in which Bob has a pathological fear of cats andkeeps cats get eliminated from the list. 

God then chooses to actualize one of these feasible worlds, presumably the one He considers most optimal. So then, God’s knowledge in the third and final stage is His knowledge of the actual world. 

To illustrate, let’s say that the world God chose to actualize is the one in which Bob has the greatest chance of coming to know God in a saving way. If Bob’s greatest chance of coming to know God in a saving way somehow involves owning a cat (let’s say he marvels at his pet’s ability to leap from one tree branch to another and land with near-perfect balance, and then thinks to himself, “Such graceful and agile creatures couldn’t exist by mere chance, but must have been created by an intelligent designer”), then Bob will not have a pathological fear of cats in the actual world.

Let’s assume that God chose to actualize our world in the way I just described. Let’s also assume two additional things—first, that in any of the feasible (stage 2) worlds in which some people would accept God, some would also reject Him; second, let’s say that there are some people who would reject God in any of the feasible worlds (Craig calls this “transworld damnation”). We can’t prove these additional assumptions, but we can’t disprove them either. They are both logically possible. 

We can now bring all of this to bear on the problem of “those who have never heard,” and say that it’s at least possible that God chose to actualize such a world that any person who never hears the gospel in earthly life would have rejected it even if he or she had heard the gospel. Pretty interesting, yes? 

We can confidently say that it’s possible that God arranged things this way, but can we say He probably did with the same degree of confidence? I don’t know, probably not. But I do know that if anyone can pull something like this off, it’s our creator God, whose thoughts and ways transcend ours as much as the heavens do the earth (Isaiah 55:8-9; Romans 11:33). 

So—what does this gain us? If true, our problem shrinks to nil. And as we saw, no one can argue against it with 100% certainty. At the very least, then, no one can hold up the question of “those who have never heard” as a surefire defeater of the Christian worldview.

Those Who Have Never Heard, Part 2: Two Circumstances

Did you know that the total number of people on earth right now makes up about six percent of the total number of people ever born? Or how about this—the world’s population is today roughly four times as large as it was 100 years ago. Pretty crazy, right? The recent population boom significantly alters how we approach the question I introduced in the previous reflection—the question of “those who have never heard.” 

In part 1, I introduced our question and then set the stage for the discussion by looking at the three main ways people typically approach the question of who will and who will not be saved—exclusivism, inclusivism, anduniversalism. I settled on a modified form of exclusivism which holds that while most people become saved as a result of a Christian sharing the gospel of Christ with him or her, there may be select others who become saved as result of a dream or vision directly from Christ (or something along those lines).

My primary aim here is to make you aware of two often-overlooked demographic circumstances, and to address how those circumstances greatly reduce the need to worry about the question of “those who have never heard.” The first has to do with population growth. The second relates to infant and child mortality rates. Let’s take a look at population growth first. 

According to estimates I gathered from multiple resources (see below), the global population around the year 1 CE amounted to less than 300 million. By about 1800, the population passed one billion for the first time. By 2000, the population had passed six billion. People estimate that by 2050, the world’s population will amount to over nine billion. 

If you are visually oriented, take a look at this chart:

Here’s the main point I’m building up to: The modern Protestant missions movement began around the same time as this exponential boom. On top of that, consider the astronomical increase in human travel and communication capabilities that started around the time of the 18thcentury enlightenment, and has only been steadily increasing ever since. 

Just think about it: As the global population exploded, access to the gospel of Jesus Christ exploded along with it, so much so that we can even say that a sizable percentage of everyone ever born lived in an age of unprecedented gospel access. And this percentage will keep growing the longer the Lord tarries. When the current chapter of the human story comes to an end, it’s possible that the number of people who lived with some level of gospel access will outweigh—perhaps even vastly outweigh—the number of those who didn’t. In the words of a friend of mine, “It almost seems like God knew what He was doing.” 

A second circumstance I want to make you aware of relates to infant and child mortality rates. I read about this in Don Richardson’s book Heaven Wins: Heaven, Hell and the Hope of Every Person. Richardson estimates that, due to a combination of pre-birth, infant, and child death, roughly 70% of all human beings ever conceived never lived past age five. (After reviewing Richardson’s numbers, I put the number closer to 64%.) If we assume an age of moral accountability (and I think the Bible gives great reason to affirm this—see, for example, James 4:17), then every single one of these children went straight into the presence of Jesus. (See Robert Lightner, Safe in the Arms of Jesus: God’s Provision for the Death of Those Who Cannot Believe [Kregel Publications, 2000].)

Allow me to pause a moment to acknowledge the grim nature of this circumstance. No one can deny the profound tragedy of losing a child. It is one of the most terrible things a parent can endure in this broken world. I do not bring it up lightly. But I wanted to mention it because it bears on our question. After all, if Richardson’s estimates even remotely approximate the actual situation, we can affirm the salvation of a vast majority of all people ever conceived. We know from Scripture that God specializes in hijacking evil circumstances for good (Romans 8:28), sometimes even horrendously evil circumstances like the Cross. Perhaps this qualifies as one such circumstance.

In sum, these two circumstances make two things very likely. First, a much larger percentage of people than you might think will have had at least some chance to receive the gospel during earthly life. Second, a massive percentage of all people ever conceived automatically go to heaven. You can see why these circumstances make the question of “those who have never heard” much less potentially problematic. Before bringing this topic to a close, let’s look at it from one more angle. 

In the next reflection (part 3), I want to walk you through a way of looking at God’s foreknowledge that hopefully will help us deal with whatever problems remain.

Population resources:

http://www.ecology.com/population-estimates-year-2050/

https://ourworldindata.org/world-population-growth

http://worldpopulationhistory.org/map/1/mercator/1/0/25/

http://www.prb.org/Publications/Articles/2002/HowManyPeopleHaveEverLivedonEarth.aspx

Those Who Have Never Heard, Part 1: Three Viewpoints

Imagine hell with me for a moment. The roar and hiss of the flames mingle with a chorus of tormented screams in a ceaseless, eternal drone of horror. The people cry out in different languages, some of the voices high-pitched, others low. Sweet memories from life linger in their minds—the thrill of falling in love, a newborn’s piercing first cries, the sensation of wet grass on bare feet, the breathtaking deep oranges and reds of a sunset. All of it, lovely. All of it, gone forever. Only darkness and flame and bitterness remain.

Would anyone want this? I can't imagine so. Yet, we know from Scripture that all who reject God’s offer of salvation in Jesus will end up in such a place. This probably didn’t bother Christians of past ages, because pre-modern Westerners probably thought they comprised the majority of the world’s population. If someone rejected the gospel, he or she did so with full knowledge, and full culpability. But today, we know that millions have died throughout history without ever hearing the gospel of Jesus Christ. And if God can only save a person from eternal damnation when that person knowingly makes a free-will decision to trust in Christ, millions have gone to their graves with zero opportunity to escape hell.

This thought horrifies me, and I believe rightly so. Why would our omnipotent God arrange things this way? Does He really desire the salvation of all people as it says in 1 Timothy 2:4? This challenge, the challenge of “those who have never heard,” can be a real bear of a problem in the minds of Christians who think seriously about their faith and its implications. It raises questions of fairness. But more than this, it challenges the legitimacy of the Christian faith. To bring this out, let me ask a question: is a truth that is only available to certain people at certain times in history really the truth at all?

I’ve done a lot of thinking about this question. Beginning with this reflection (and followed by two more), I hope to show that finding answers might not be as difficult as you may think.

To set the stage, I want here to briefly address three major ways people have typically approached the question of who will and will not be saved. This will surface some of the tensions involved in our question. I also think we may begin to find some answers here. In another reflection, I want to talk about two circumstances that I think make the question much less problematic. In the final reflection, I will explore an interesting way of approaching the question that can help us deal with any remaining problems.

The three ways people have typically approached the question of who will and who will not be saved are these—exclusivism, universalism, and a more middle-ground approach called inclusivism. In exclusivism, God requires explicit knowledge of the sacrificial death and resurrection of Jesus (“special revelation”) for salvation. So, let’s say it’s the year 100 CE. A twenty-something ancient Mayan man—let’s call him Bob—catches an incurable disease and dies. Now, Bob is far from a perfect person, but he never killed anybody or cheated on his wife. Because he never had a chance to hear and respond to the gospel, however, he ends up in hell.

Exclusivism is far and away the most common position held among evangelical Christians, and with good reason. Among the three positions, it involves the least amount of “hermeneutical gymnastics” when approaching the relevant scriptural passages (for example, John 14:6; Acts 4:12; 1 Timothy 2:5).

On the opposite end of the spectrum is universalism. In this view, God will ultimately accept everyone into heaven, regardless of their deeds or faith (or lack thereof). Instead of being a relatively decent guy, let’s say that Bob the Mayan gets sick and dies after a wild life of partying and all manner of vice. No problem. God will eventually accept him into heaven, even though he may have to first spend two or three hundred years in hell to atone for his wickedness. As attractive as this may sound, it just isn’t biblical. The Scriptures clearly speak of two categories of people (the saved and the unsaved) and two possible destinies (heaven for the saved, hell for the unsaved).

In between exclusivism and universalism, we find a middle-ground position called inclusivism. In inclusivism, God can save a person on Christ’s merits without that person necessarily knowing anything about Jesus or the Bible (what theologians call special revelation). Rather, God can save people on the basis of their response to what can be learned from nature and reason (theologians call this general revelation). Let’s suppose again that Bob is a relatively decent guy. He recognizes that he (along with everyone else) possesses an internal sense of right and wrong—a conscience—even though he does not know where this comes from. What’s more, for all his life Bob has tried to order his thoughts and actions so as to satisfy the demands of his conscience. When Bob dies, God accepts him into heaven on Christ’s merits, not because he heard and responded to the gospel, but because he responded appropriately “to the light that he had.”

You can see why inclusivism might make our question less challenging. In this view, explicit knowledge of Christ is not an absolute requirement for salvation. For the inclusivist, there is hope that we’ll see people in heaven who died without gospel access. Personally, I hope we will see many such people in heaven.

We must concede, however, that many evangelicals do not consider inclusivism to be a valid biblical position. Beyond that, even most inclusivists lack a high degree of confidence that many people have actually been saved in the way we just considered. This lack of confidence seems justified. After all, why would Christ have given us the Great Commission to evangelize the entire world with the gospel of Christ (including pagan lands) if God could and would save mass numbers of people apart from the gospel message?

Exclusivism, inclusivism, and universalism—these are the three typical approaches held by many. But I cannot bring our discussion to a close without mentioning a fourth possible option that, to my knowledge, doesn’t have a name. It’s a mediating position between exclusivism and inclusivism. It’s really a variation of exclusivism, but one that leans in an inclusivist direction. This fourth position is based on the idea that even though most people become saved as a result of a Christian sharing the gospel of Christ with him or her, there may be some who become saved apart from a human gospel-bearer. Let’s revisit our Mayan friend Bob one last time. Bob lies on his deathbed after having lived a decent life in response to God’s general revelation. God, seeing that Bob has tried to live morally, sends him a gospel vision. Bob responds in belief before he dies, and God accepts him into heaven.

The downside of this view is that we don’t have many stories of this sort of thing happening in the world. There is one notable recent exception, however. I am referring to the “Jesus dream” phenomenon in the Muslim world. Stories of Muslims experiencing dreams and visions of Jesus—or of a white-robed man who sets them along a path that culminates in conversion—have been coming out of the Muslim world for the past several years. I highly recommend Tom Doyle’s book Dreams and Visions: Is Jesus Awakening the Muslim World? on the subject. Many would tell you that even when a Muslim experiences a Jesus dream, he or she still requires contact with a Christian in order to know enough to convert. I think most cases validate this. But from what I remember, at least one of the documented stories in Doyle’s book involves a Muslim who received enough information during the Jesus encounter (or encounters) to be converted. If God can do this for Muslims, why could He not do it for anyone at any point in history throughout the world?

So there you have it—the three major ways of thinking about who will and who will not be saved. I hope our discussion has at least got you thinking about our question of “those who have never heard the gospel.” And I believe our modified exclusivism gives us a way to begin releasing some of the tension and still remain firmly planted in orthodox territory.

In my next reflection, I want to make you aware of a couple of frequently-overlooked circumstances that, in my humble opinion, make this bear of a problem into a much smaller animal. Like a coyote. Or a bobcat. Or something.