My (Eastern Orthodox) priest came over to bless our house a few years ago, and I decided to ask him a question about salvation. His smile showed me he gets this question quite often. That morning, I joined with the millions of well-meaning Christians concerned about the spiritual welfare of persons who had never heard of the Gospel, the name of Jesus, or the Church, and asked the question, “What about those who have never heard?”

This question is in the same category as “What about babies or children below the ‘age of accountability’?” so I’ll consider that question here, too, along with “What about those of another religion who have never heard the Christian gospel?”

Rephrasing The Question

I think the question is best answered by rephrasing it. And since I am blessed with the spiritual gift of sarcasm, I suggest the following possible updates to this age-old question:

1. How can God reach out to people and save them without our help and ideas?
2. Did God know those people in the jungles existed when He came up with the plan of salvation?
3. How did God manage to save people before the 700 club?
4. Is it time for God to admit He really didn’t think this redemption thing through?

In other words:

How could God’s plan of salvation have gone so horribly wrong?!

By the way, for those asking a similar question about those who have “never heard the name of Jesus” I hate to tell you this but his name is really “Yeshua”, which in Hebrew is “Joshua”. So by whose “name” are we saved? But this is how cults are started…

Now, To The Solutions

Now that I’ve redefined the question into several more accurate questions, I now suggest the following possible solutions to God to fix His incomplete idea of salvation, as it pertains to those who have never heard the gospel — those who have never even heard of Billy Graham:

1. God could judge them based on how the would have responded to the gospel.
2. God could present the gospel to them shortly before, during, or right after death.
3. Maybe God has taken all the people He knows will reject the gospel, and put them in the jungle, and in other religions (and in the cubicle next to mine).
4. God could refuse to let them into heaven, but allow them to remain in the foyer, or maybe heaven’s bookstore/coffee shop.
5. God could let them watch an unedited film of the lives of every person who has ever asked that question, and then let them decide if they want to be a Christian, like them.
6. For teenagers who have never heard, after they die God could invite them to one big pizza party with a band, and at the end of the night, trick them by scaring them about hell.

And these are solutions I came up with in just a few minutes!

Really, any question that begins “How can God-” should be stopped cold right there and answered “By using the same power He used when created the universe.” It’s a little like wondering how in the world Lance Armstrong could win a cycling race in some remote third world country I just found out about, or how Einstein could solve addition problems without the internet. God has salvation under control, and there are no exceptions he didn’t already know about when Jesus died for the whole world. God is intimately aware of the people we’re not aware of at all. He knows the people we don’t. There are people who have never heard of Jesus, but there’s nobody Jesus has never heard of.

Conclusion

So what’s the answer? I don’t know. But I know what the question says about me. The fact is, God came a long way 2000 years ago and went through quite a lot to have overlooked this part of the plan. Actually, God doesn’t overlook anything or anyone, we do. God is not unfair, we are. And judging by the amount of money I spend on Starbucks compared to the amount I spend on missionary work, I’m not in a position to ask such a question, much less answer it. As a matter of fact, if I look at every advantage I posses in my spiritual life, including the Bible, the writings of the church fathers, a local parish, a country with freedom of religion, and many more, and then compare my faithfulness to the gospel to that of the Christians of the first century, it seems apparent to me that more “hearing” has not in my case led to more righteousness. With my advantages comes greater responsibility, which is the answer my priest provided. I used to wonder “What about those who have never heard?” Now I ask myself “What about those who have?”

A few years I was having a discussion with a friend about the sovereignty of God vs. the free-will of man. We proof-texted each other for awhile, but since that never works, my friend decided to appeal to the one thing a former fundamentalist (now Eastern Orthodox) Christian has trouble letting go of – logic. “If God is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent,” he said, “then free-will cannot exist.” In other words, God’s act in setting the world in motion, His knowledge that some particular thing is about to happen, and His refusal to stop it from happening is tantamount to His causing it to happen. But does this scenario show a powerful, logical God? Or a God subject to our concept of power and logic?

If you are reading this hoping to find truth and guidance, please read my Theology Disclaimer.

Illogical and Alogical Questions

I was in sixth grade in a Christian school when I first heard the question, “Can God make a weight so big that even He can’t lift it?” I also heard the related question, “Can God make a math problem so hard even He can’t solve it?” The (Christian school) teacher’s response was predictable. He said the question didn’t have an answer because the questions are flawed. I heard a radio talk show host ridicule those types of questions by offering another question in response: Can God make a square circle? He went on to explain that God cannot, because He can only do anything that’s logically possible, meaning that the question was illogical and so wouldn’t apply to our logical God. The “square circle” question certainly is illogical on its face, but the others might not be, as I explain below. Either way, considering whether or not God is logical, and what this means for free will, caused me to rethink the three things we’re all taught God is.

Omniscient

Consider these three events:

1. Jesus, who was both fully God and fully man, got hungry. One day He was hungry and noticed a fig tree in the distance. He walked toward the fig tree and once He was close, he saw it had no figs. But didn’t He know that already? After all God is omniscient isn’t He? He then curses the fig tree and it withers. Maybe this incident was staged to show His power and he just pretended to not know it had no figs.
2. When Jesus was instructing his disciples about the last days, He mentioned even He does not know when He will return, but only the Father in heaven. Is He lying?
3. He was in a crowd, and He feels the divine healing power go through Him yet he says, “Who touched me?” Did He really not know?

I think the answer to these questions is one of the wonders of the incarnation, and has changed my view of God’s omniscience to the following: God knows everything, but He Himself is not subject to knowledge. In other words, He controls His own awareness, just like He controlled His own power to come down off the cross, or speak up in His defense at His trial, or to remember our sins. So to see His omniscience as His consciousness being invaded against His will is not seeing omniscience properly, as it applies to God, and is also an argument against His omnipotence. I am a human being and am subject to the knowledge I have. I can’t not know something, unless I forget it, which I can only do by accident — you can’t forget something on purpose. But God can know or not know as He wishes. A popular atheistic argument is this: If God knows the future He logically cannot change the future, making him not omnipotent. If however, He is truly omnipotent and can change the future at any time, then He can’t possible know it. I think a theistic response would be: God can choose to limit His knowledge, His power, or both, as in the Biblical examples above, which I believe is exactly what He did in the act of becoming incarnate. So this leads us back to the trick question “Can God make a weight so big even He can’t lift it?” My answer, drawn from the fig tree story is this: Yes He can. And then if He chooses, He can lift it after all. In taking on humanity, hunger became a weight he chose to not be able to lift. Yet he never chose to refrain from cursing fig trees or multiplying loaves and fishes. God is all-knowing, but not in a literal, logical sense.

Omnipresent

Is God in my heart? Yes. Is He in my house? Yes. Is He in my bathtub? Yes, because God is everywhere. So if God is everywhere, then how can I exist at all? Is He physically present in the same place my hand is? If so then either my hand doesn’t really exist in the same space, or my hand is God. But isn’t God a spirit? If so how does He occupy space at all? Here we have the same problem as we did with Omniscience. God is everywhere, but He is not subject to space. In fact insofar as space is a created thing, He created space itself, which certainly is not the same thing as He Himself. Maybe another definition of creation is the “not God”, or the spiritual and physical place God chooses to have exist differently from Himself. Any way you look at it, God may be everywhere, but he is not everything, which means He’s not really everywhere in the logical sense.

Omnipotent

God can do anything. Can God sin? No — because it’s not consistent with His nature. But I thought omnipotence was His nature. So God can do anything except sin. But hypothetically, could God sin? Herein is the problem with omnipotence as an attribute of God. Since God does as He chooses, anything he doesn’t want to do he doesn’t do, which has the same practical effect of His not being able to do it. This goes to the question, “Is God’s will always done? Does anything ever happen that he doesn’t want to happen?” A possible answer is found in the garden of Gesthemane, when Jesus, who is fully God and fully man asks the Father to “remove this cup”, yet desires “not My will, but Yours be done.” Jesus said His spirit was willing, but His flesh was week. Did Jesus want to go to the cross? Once again, there is no way to reduce an answer to pure logic. Omnipotence could be defined as the ability to do what you want. God doesn’t really have ability in the human or logical sense of the word, since ability would be something that exists outside of Himself — something he possesses. Did He have the ability to create light? Not really, He just said let there be light. The light wasn’t as much a product of His creativity as an obedience to His command. Ability, understood as the potential to do something,  or power implies choice, time, and matter, which are all things God can do without and still be God. Even if God is omnipotent in a logical sense, we must admit his power is still subject to his will or nature, which seems to indicate his power is subject to something. So once again we have to say God is all-powerful, but without being subject to our concept of power. This is where the mystery of free-will might enter. If God is all-powerful, yet not subject to power, He may indeed have created creatures that have some free will. In other words, just as He chose to limit his knowledge (above) maybe He chose to limit His own power — something He has the power to do. An all-powerful God who is himself subject to our concept power could not do that. A God who speaks light into existence probably can.

Conclusion

So at least two of our original questions “Can God make a weight so big even He can’t lift it?”, “Can God make a math problem so hard he can’t solve it?”, and “Can God make a square circle?” may have an answer after all.  But I have an even better question. If I could go back in time and ask King Solomon (the wisest man who ever lived) a question, I definitely wouldn’t choose one of those. I have a much better question that I challenge all the wise people in the history from King Solomon, to Aristotle, to John Calvin to tackle using logic, whose answer modern day Jews, Christians, and Muslims all have a stake in. The question: “Can God become man?”