How Can Jesus be the Only Way of Salvation?

William Lane Craig | Thursday, March 08, 2001
Copyright © 2001, William Lane Craig

Edited transcript from a message given at Grace Valley Christian Center Wednesday evening, March 7, 2001

No Salvation Apart from Christ

Is Jesus Christ the only way of salvation? That is a very important question. Acts 4:12 states, “There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved.” Thus the earliest apostles of Christ preached, and thus they believed. Indeed, the message that salvation is found exclusively through Christ alone permeates the entire New Testament. For example, in Ephesians 2:12 Paul invites his Gentile converts to recall their pre-Christian days, saying, “Remember that at that time you were separated from Christ, aliens to the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the covenants of grace, having no hope and without God in the world.”

It is the burden of the opening chapters of Paul’s letter to the Romans to show that this desolate condition is the general situation of mankind. In Romans 1: 20 Paul explains that God’s eternal power and deity are evident to all persons everywhere through his self-revelation in creation, so that all persons are without excuse for not recognizing the existence of an eternal and powerful Creator God. In Romans 2:15 Paul goes on to explain that God’s moral law is written on the hearts of all men so that all men are responsible for recognizing their moral culpability before a holy God, and their need of his moral forgiveness and cleansing.

In Romans 2:7 Paul says that God offers eternal life to all those who will seek him, all those who by patience in well-doing seek for glory and honor and immortality. I believe that this is a bona fide offer, that salvation is literally universally accessible to all persons everywhere, if they will respond in an appropriate affirmative way to God’s general revelation in nature and in conscience.

But rather than respond to the Creator in an affirmative way, people ignore the Creator and do not worship him. Instead they create gods of their own making and worship and serve them. Rather than obey the moral law that God has written on their hearts, they flout the moral law and plunge into moral degeneracy and sin. Paul explains this in Romans 1:21-32.

Paul’s conclusion comes in Romans 3:9-12, where he says that all men are under the power of sin; that none is righteous, not even one; that no one does good, no one seeks for God; together they have gone astray, and all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. Moreover, Paul goes on to explain in Romans 3:19-20 that no one can redeem himself out of this state of condemnation before God by means of righteous living. He says no man will be justified before God by the works of the law.

Finally, in Romans 3:21-26, Paul explains that God has provided a means of escape through Jesus Christ’s sacrificial death on the cross. Forgiveness and grace is made available through Christ, and thus God has provided a singular avenue of escape, a singular solution to man’s moral predicament before God. The same thing could be proved from the writings of the apostle John in the New Testament, and even from Jesus’ own words. The logic of the New Testament is clear: the universality of sin and the uniqueness of Christ’s sacrificial death entail that there is no salvation apart from Christ.

No “Universal Religion”

Now this doctrine was just as scandalous in the polytheistic world of the first century as it is in the politically correct world of the twenty-first century. But in time, as Christianity grew and eventually came to be the official religion of the Roman Empire, the scandal receded. Indeed, for Medieval theologians like Augustine and Aquinas, one of the marks of the true church was its catholicity-that is to say, its universality. The fact that the church filled the whole world was evidence of the fact that this was indeed the truth of God.

The demise of this doctrine came with the so-called “Expansion of Europe,” the three centuries of exploration and discovery that took place between about 1450 and 1750. Through the travels and the voyages of men like Marco Polo, Christopher Columbus, Ferdinand Magellan and others, whole new civilizations and new worlds were discovered. Thus it was found that Christianity, far from being the universal religion of mankind, was in fact confined to a corner of the globe, largely to western Europe. Every other country and civilization seemed to have their own religion, and they had not so much as even heard of Jesus Christ.

This realization had a two-fold impact upon people’s religious thinking. First, it tended to relativize religious beliefs. It seemed that no religion could legitimately claim to be the universal religion of mankind; no religion could assume itself to be the absolute truth. Rather, every society and every culture had its own religion which was appropriate to itself, and none of them could claim to be the universal faith for all people. Secondly, it made Christianity’s claim to exclusive salvation through Christ alone seem narrow and cruel. How could God condemn millions of people in China to hell for not believing in Jesus Christ when they had not so much as even heard of him?

Reinterpreting Christian Missions

In our own day, the influx of immigrants into Western nations as well as the advances in telecommunications that have shrunk the world to a “global village” have only served to heighten our awareness of the religious diversity of mankind. The result of this has been that mainline churches have largely lost their sense of missionary calling. No longer is the missionary task to carry the gospel to a world that is lost and dying apart from Christ. Instead, missions are reinterpreted as a sort of social improvement for the Third World, a kind of “Christian Peace Corps,” if you will, to better the economic and social lot of Third World countries.

Nowhere does one see this reinterpretation of Christian missions more clearly than in the documents of the Second Vatican Council, which met during the 1960s. According to the documents of Vatican II, those who have not yet received the gospel are related in various ways to the people of God. For example, Jews, it says, are especially dear to God, and Catholics should now pray for the Jews, not for the conversion of the Jews. The plan of salvation includes all who acknowledge the Creator, including Muslims, and the church looks upon Muslims with esteem. The documents declare that missionary work is to be directed only toward those who are still involved in the worship of idols. They go on to state that people who by conscience strive to do God’s will can also be saved. Thus the documents of the Second Vatican Council seem to imply that great multitudes of persons who reject Christ are in fact saved and are therefore not appropriate subjects for evangelism.

In recent years this revisionist thinking has begun to enter into the Evangelical church itself. For example, at the November 1992 meeting of the Evangelical Theology Group at the American Academy of Religion, Clark Pinnock, a noted evangelical theologian, said, “I am appealing to Evangelicals to make the shift to a more inclusive outlook, much the way the Catholics did at Vatican II.” Pinnock expresses optimism that great numbers of the unevangelized will in fact be saved. He says, “God will find faith in people without the person even realizing that he or she had it.” He even entertains the possibility of people’s being given another chance after death, freed from the effects of sin. Pinnock writes: “Imagine it-people are raised from the dead by the power of Jesus’ resurrection, free of whatever had obscured the love of God and prevented them from receiving it in life. God is a serious lover, who wants everyone with no opportunity to respond to his offer to have one. No sinner is excluded who has been included in salvation by God but lacked opportunity to respond to grace.”

Pinnock recognizes that this seems to undermine both the rationale and the urgency of the task of world missions. But he responds this isn’t in fact the case, since, first of all, “God has called us to engage in missionary work and therefore we should obey.” But notice that that response doesn’t provide any rationale for why God would issue such a command. Indeed, this becomes just blind obedience to a pointless command on God’s part.

Second, he says, “Missions is broader than just securing people’s eternal destiny.” In other words, we’re back to the idea of the Christian Peace Corps once again. Finally, number three, he says, “Missions should be positive. It is not an ultimatum: ‘Believe or be damned!'” Well, of course missions is not that, simply. But on the other hand, it’s hard to deny that from Pinnock’s view there seems to be little urgency to carry the gospel to people. Why should I give up fifteen to twenty-five of the best years of my life to go carry the gospel to people who are already saved? I think it’s ironic that as the church is on the very verge of completing the task of world evangelization, it should be her very theologians which threaten to trip her at the finish line.

Revisionist Theology

The theological fallout of this revisionist thinking is very serious. It has led ultimately to the denial of the deity of Christ. Nowhere is this more evident than in the work of Professor John Hick of the University of Birmingham. Professor Hick began his spiritual pilgrimage and his scholarly work as a relatively conservative Christian. His first book was entitled Christianity at the Center. But as professor Hick began to study the various religions of the world, he began to be convinced that these persons surely could not be condemned by God to everlasting separation from him, and that therefore these other religions must be equally valid avenues of salvation along with Christian faith.

But he realized what that meant-Jesus Christ could not, therefore, be the incarnation of God whose atoning death on the cross is God’s exclusive provision for salvation. He was eventually led to write a book entitled The Myth of God Incarnate. In this book he writes the following: “Transposed into theological terms, the problem which has come to the surface in the encounter of Christianity with the other world religions is this: If Jesus was literally God incarnate, and if it is by his death alone that men can be saved, and by their response to him alone that they can appropriate that salvation, then the only doorway to eternal life is Christian faith. It would follow from this that the large majority of the human race so far have not been saved. But is it credible that the loving God and Father of all men has decreed that only those born within one particular thread of human history shall be saved?” His answer is “No, that is not credible,” and therefore Hick was led to regard the incarnation and deity of Christ as a myth. As I said, these issues have enormous theological significance.

Does God Condemn the Uninformed?

Let’s analyze exactly what the supposed difficulty is. What is it, exactly, about the religious diversity of the world that presents a problem to the exclusivity of salvation through Christ alone? Is it simply the idea that a loving God wouldn’t send people to hell? Well, no, I don’t think that is really the essence of the problem. The Scripture is clear that God desires all persons to be saved and to go to heaven. Second Peter 3:9 says, “God is not willing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance.” First Timothy 2:4 says, “God desires all persons to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth.”

God, through his Spirit, seeks to draw all persons to himself. Therefore, anybody who makes a free and well-informed decision to reject Christ seals his own fate; he separates himself from God. In one sense, God doesn’t send him to hell. Rather, this person separates himself from God forever. He is literally self-condemned, and he is condemned despite God’s will and every effort to save him. So I don’t think the problem is simply that a loving God wouldn’t send people to hell.

Well then, does the problem lie with the idea that a loving God wouldn’t send people to hell simply because they were uninformed or misinformed about Christ? Again, that doesn’t seem to be the essence of the problem. The Bible suggests that God doesn’t judge people who haven’t heard about Christ on the basis of whether or not they’ve believed in Christ. That would be manifestly unfair. God couldn’t expect them to believe in Christ if they’d never heard of him. Rather, the Scripture suggests that God will judge those who have never heard of Christ on the basis of the information that they have received, namely the light of God’s general revelation in conscience and in nature. Remember, we saw that all men everywhere are responsible for at least acknowledging the existence of a Creator God of the universe to whom they are morally responsible, and Paul says that if people will respond affirmatively to God’s general revelation in nature and conscience, God will give them eternal life.

Of course this doesn’t mean that people can be saved apart from Christ. Salvation is exclusively through the cross of Christ alone. But what this means is that somebody could be saved through the cross of Christ without any conscious knowledge of Christ. There are many such examples in the Old Testament. Job had no knowledge of Christ whatsoever. He wasn’t even a member of the covenant family of Israel. Yet Job clearly had a personal relationship with God. Job was saved through the death of Christ even though he had no conscious knowledge of Christ.

So could there perhaps be any modern-day Jobs, living in places of the world where they have not yet heard the gospel but who have responded in an affirmative and appropriate way to the light of nature and conscience that they have received? If so, Paul says that God will apply to them the benefits of Christ’s death without their conscious knowledge of Christ, and that they will be saved. Thus salvation is truly universally accessible to all persons everywhere.

Unfortunately, if we take the New Testament seriously, I don’t think there’s much reason for optimism that there are very many people like this. As we’ve already seen, the New Testament teaches that, rather than respond to general revelation in an appropriate way, people choose to ignore the Creator and flout the moral law. When judged by the standards of general revelation in nature and conscience, people don’t even measure up to those much lower standards. Even judged by these lower standards, they would still be justly condemned before God.

Three Difficult Questions

Again, I don’t think the problem is simply that a loving God wouldn’t send people to hell due to their lack of information about Christ. Rather, it seems to me the problem is this: If God is all-knowing, then he knew who would receive Christ and be saved, and who would not receive Christ, and be lost. But that then raises three very difficult questions. First, why didn’t God bring the gospel to people who he knew would accept it if they heard it, even though they reject the light of general revelation that they do have?

To give an illustration, imagine a North American Indian living in the Middle Ages, before missionaries had arrived on the scene. Let’s call him Walking Bear. Let’s suppose that Walking Bear looks up at the stars at night, sees the beauty and intricacy of nature around him, and senses that all of this has been made by the Great Spirit. Moreover, as he looks into his own heart, he senses the moral law of God written upon it. He understands that all men are brothers who have been made by the Great Spirit, and that therefore they should live in love for one another. But instead of responding to the Great Spirit and worshiping and following him and obeying his moral law, let’s suppose that Walking Bear instead chooses to create gods of his own making, finite spirits that he worships and serves, and ignores the Great Spirit. Rather than live in love for his fellow man, he lives in selfishness, greed, rapacity and hatred.

Now I think we would all agree that when judged by the standards of general revelation in nature and conscience, Walking Bear would be justly condemned before God. But let’s suppose that if only the missionaries had arrived, that Walking Bear would have responded to the gospel and placed his faith in Christ and been saved. In that case, it seems that Walking Bear’s condemnation before God is due to historical and geographical accident. He just had the bad luck to be born at a time and place in history where he didn’t hear the gospel. But if only he had heard the gospel, he would have been saved. Thus his condemnation before God seems to be due to the accidents of geography and history, which is surely incompatible with the nature of an all-loving and all-powerful God.

Secondly, even more fundamentally, why did God even create the world when he knew that so many people would not receive Christ, and would be lost? Thirdly, even more radically, why didn’t God create a world in which everyone freely receives Christ and is saved? Such a world is logically possible, so why didn’t God create such a world? What is the Christian supposed to say in response to these questions? Does Christianity make God out to be cruel and unloving?

The Logical Argument

In order to answer these questions, I think that we need to look more closely at the logic of these arguments. Basically, what the pluralistic objector to salvation through Christ alone is saying is that there is a logical contradiction between these two statements:

A. God is all-powerful and all-loving.

B. Some people never hear the gospel and are lost.

The pluralist claims that these two statements are logically incompatible-they cannot both be true.

But let’s ask ourselves: Why think that this is impossible? Why can’t A and B both be true? There’s no explicit contradiction between the two, so the pluralist must be saying that these two statements are somehow implicitly contradictory. In that case, he must be assuming some hidden premises which would serve to bring out this contradiction and make it explicit.

What are those hidden premises? I have never actually seen any pluralist articulate these hidden assumptions, but it seems to me that he is making two hidden assumptions. First of all, he is assuming that if God is all-powerful, he can create a world in which everybody hears the gospel and is saved. Secondly, he is assuming that if God is all-loving, then he prefers a world in which everybody hears the gospel and is freely saved. Since God is all-powerful and all-loving, it follows that he both can and would create a world in which everyone hears the gospel and is freely saved. However, that is incompatible with B-that some people never hear the gospel and are lost. In order for this argument to be successful, both of these hidden assumptions must necessarily be true; therefore, we need to assess whether or not these assumptions are true.

Assumption: God Can Save Everyone

Let’s take that first assumption: If God is all-powerful, he can create a world in which everybody hears the gospel and is freely saved. Is that assumption necessarily true? I don’t think it is.

I think we would probably all agree that God certainly could create a world in which everybody hears the gospel. But so long as people are genuinely free, there’s no guarantee that in such a world everybody would freely respond to the gospel and be saved. In fact, there’s no guarantee whatsoever that in such a world the balance between the saved and the lost would be any better than it is in the actual world. In fact, it’s probable that in any world of free creatures which God could create, some people would freely reject God and be lost. Therefore, that first assumption is simply not necessarily true. It is not necessarily true that if God is all-powerful he can create a world in which everybody hears the gospel and is saved.

Now that alone would serve to make this argument logically fallacious. But what about the second hidden assumption? Is it necessarily true that if God is all-loving that he would prefer a world in which everybody hears the gospel and is saved? Well, again, that just doesn’t seem to be necessarily true.

Assumption: God Prefers to Save Everyone

Let’s suppose, for the sake of argument, that God could create a world in which everybody hears the gospel and freely responds to it and is saved. Does God’s being all-loving compel him to prefer such a world over a world in which some people freely reject the gospel and are lost? Not necessarily. Those worlds in which universal salvation occurs could have other overriding deficiencies which would cause them to be less preferable than a world in which some people freely reject Christ and are lost.

For example, suppose that the only worlds in which everybody hears the gospel and freely responds to it and is saved are worlds with only a handful of people in them, say three or four, and if God were to create any more people, then at least one of them would have freely rejected the gospel and been lost. Must God’s being all-loving compel him to prefer one of these radically underpopulated worlds over a world in which multitudes freely receive Christ and are saved, even though that means that there are some people who would freely reject him and be lost? Well, that’s certainly not obvious to me.

It seems to me that as long as God provides sufficient grace for salvation to every person that he creates, then he is no less loving for preferring a world that is more populous in which multitudes freely come to receive him and are saved, even though that means that some people might freely reject him and be lost.

Optimal Balance of Saved and Lost

Therefore, as neither of these hidden assumptions is necessarily true, the argument of the pluralist is doubly fallacious. Not only has the pluralist failed to show A and B to be inconsistent with each other, but I think we can in fact we go a step further by revealing C; that is, we can actually prove that A and B are logically compatible with each other. In order to do this, all we need to do is to find some third statement, C, which is possible with A and together with A entails B. As long as C is even possible, it shows that A and B are logically compatible with each other. I think we can find such a proposition.

Consider the following: God is an all-loving and all-powerful being, and as a good and loving being, God wants as many people as possible to be saved and as few as possible to be lost. It’s his goal, then, to achieve an optimal balance between these, to create no more of the lost than is necessary to achieve a certain number of the saved. But it’s possible that the actual world has such a balance. It’s possible that in order to create this many people who will be saved, God also had to create this many people who will be lost. It’s possible that had God created a world in which fewer people were lost, then even fewer people would have been saved. It’s possible that in order to achieve a multitude of saints, God had to also accept a multitude of sinners.

Now, someone might object at this point that an all-loving God would not create people who he knows will be lost but who would have been saved if only they had heard the gospel. But how do we know that there are any such persons? It’s reasonable to assume that many people who never hear the gospel would not believe the gospel even if they did hear it. Suppose then that God has so providentially ordered the world that all persons who never hear the gospel are precisely such people. In that case, anybody who never hears the gospel and is lost is a person who would not have received the gospel and been saved even if he had heard it.

Thus no one can stand before God on the judgment day and say, “All right, God. So I didn’t respond to your general revelation in nature and conscience. But if only I’d heard the gospel, then I would have been saved.” God will say to them, “No. I knew that even if you had heard the gospel you would not have believed in it. Therefore my judgment of you on the basis of nature and conscience is neither unfair nor unloving.”

Thus we conclude it is possible that God has created a world with an optimal balance between saved and lost, and that those who never hear the gospel and are lost would not have believed in Christ even if they had heard of him. So as long as C is even possible-it doesn’t need to be true-as long as C is even possible, it shows that it is entirely logically consistent for God to be all-powerful and all-loving and yet for some people never to hear the gospel and be saved.

Now let me head off a possible misunderstanding at this point. Somebody might say, “Well, then why should we engage in missionary work at all, if all of those people who are unreached would not receive Christ if they heard of him?” This question forgets that I’m only talking about people who never hear the gospel during their lifetime. Rather, I am saying that God in his providence can so arrange the world that as the gospel spreads out from first century Palestine and begins to fill the globe, he places in its path people who he knows will respond to it if they hear it. But in his love and mercy, God ensures that no one who would believe in the gospel if he heard it, fails to hear it during his lifetime and remains ultimately unreached. Once the gospel reaches a people, then God places in that people group persons who he knew would respond to it if they heard it. But he ensures that those who never get the chance to hear it are only those who would not have freely responded to it even if they had heard it.

Summary: Three Logical Answers

On the basis of this scenario, we are equipped to offer possible answers to those three difficult questions that prompted our inquiry. Number one, taking them in reverse order: Why didn’t God create a world in which everyone would freely receive Christ and be saved? Answer: It may not be feasible for God to create such a world. If such a world were feasible, God would have created it. But given his will to create free creatures, God had to accept that some would freely reject him and be lost, and thus they are lost despite God’s will and every effort to save them.

Two: Why did God create the world when he knew that so many people would not receive Christ, and be lost? Answer: God wanted to share his love and fellowship with created persons. He knew that this meant that many of them would freely reject him and be lost. But he also knew that many others would freely receive his grace and be saved, and the happiness and blessedness of those who would accept him should not be precluded by those who would freely reject him. Those who would freely reject God and his grace shouldn’t be given a veto power over which worlds God is free to create. But God in his love and mercy has providentially ordered the world in order to achieve an optimal balance between saved and lost by maximizing the number of those who accept him and minimizing the number of those who do not.

Three: Why didn’t God bring the gospel to people who he knew would accept it even though they reject the light of general revelation that they do have? Answer: There are no such people. Rather, God in his providence has so arranged the world that those who would respond to the gospel if they heard it do hear it. Those who do not respond to God’s general revelation in nature and conscience and never hear the gospel would not have responded to it even if they had heard it. Thus no one is lost because of historical and geographical accident. Rather, anyone who wants or even would want to be saved will be saved.

Divine Appointments

Now, these are merely possible answers to the questions that we’ve posed. But one reason I find these answers so attractive is that they are so plausible. They fit in with the God who has revealed himself in Scripture. For example, in Paul’s Mars Hill address beginning in Acts 17:24 we read the following:

The God who made the world and everything in it is Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples made by hands. And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything, because he himself gives all men life and breath and everything else. From one man he made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he determined the exact times set for them and the exact places where they should live. God did this so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from every one of us. For in him we live and move and have our being.

So the solution that I’ve suggested is not only possible, but it seems to me quite plausible in light of the teaching of Scripture. It is a solution that is eminently worthy of an Almighty and all-merciful God.

In conclusion, the presence of other world religions does not undermine the Christian gospel of salvation through Christ alone. On the contrary, I think the ideas discussed herein help to put the proper perspective on Christian missions. Namely, it is our duty to carry the gospel to the whole world, trusting that God has so providentially ordered the world that through us the good news will come to people who God knew would receive it if they heard it. There are literally divine appointments out there waiting for us, persons whom God has placed in the world because he knew that we would share the gospel with them and that they would respond and be saved. Our compassion toward those in other world religions is expressed not in pretending that they are not lost and dying without Christ, but rather in our supporting and making every effort ourselves to bring to them the life-giving message of the gospel of Christ.

Question and Answer Session:

Question: You posed the question: Why did God not make a world where all men freely accepted him? And you posited an answer that it’s essentially not possible for God, while still allowing men free will, to have a world where some would not reject him. That doesn’t seem logically consistent to me, since there is such a world, called heaven. By your view, heaven would become a prison and the new creation would essentially become a world full of slaves.

I would posit another answer: Yes, God is all-loving, but he is also all-holy, and he has a desire to manifest both of those attributes. I believe this answer is more consistent with biblical revelation.

Dr. Craig: I don’t think that heaven is, in and of itself, a possible world. Rather, heaven is the climax of a world. It is the end to which the world comes, of persons who have freely decided to give their lives to Christ and to receive God’s grace and be saved. I’m also not convinced that in heaven people in fact have the free will to sin. Persons who go to heaven are confronted with the unveiled glory of God and the vision of Christ’s loveliness; they are so overwhelmed by the glory and magnificence of God that the freedom to sin is, in effect, removed. So I don’t think there’s any danger of people in heaven falling into sin and losing salvation.

On the contrary, I think that this world is a sort of veil of decision making, in which God has created us at a distance from himself. His glory is veiled so that during this lifetime we have the ability to reject him, if that’s what we choose. But for someone who is confronted in heaven with the naked glory and magnificence of God, I suspect that this is so overwhelming that in effect the freedom to sin will be removed. So I see heaven as the final state of glorification in which the freedom to sin is abolished. But it is the result, it is the climax, of a world in which people had the opportunity to either receive or to reject God’s grace.

Question: Why, then, eternal hell? Posit that men are finite, that God created man, and that man has a beginning and an end. Why then does hell necessarily have to be eternal? How does that fit in with the idea of an all-loving God?

Dr. Craig: The question raises the issue of the eternality of hell. I think that the difficulty of the eternality of hell is the following-that the punishment doesn’t seem to fit the crime. Since in this lifetime we commit only a finite number of sins, therefore this ought to merit a finite amount of punishment. To punish someone eternally for finite sins committed in this life seems to be “overdoing it,” so to speak. The punishment seems excessive for the crime.

I think there are three possible ways that we could respond to this. First of all, even if we grant that every sin deserves only a finite punishment, that doesn’t necessarily follow that hell must only be of finite duration. For think of it this way: Even if every sin has only a finite amount of punishment, if there were an infinite number of sins, then that would merit an infinite amount of punishment.

Now, obviously nobody commits an infinite number of sins during this life. But what about during the afterlife? In so far as the inhabitants of hell continue to hate God and reject him, they continue to sin, and thus they accrue to themselves more punishment. The persons in hell don’t grow repentant toward God; they grow even more implacable in their hatred of God and their rejection of him. Thus hell in a sense is literally self-perpetuating. Because sinning goes on forever, the punishment goes on forever. So I think that even if we grant that every finite sin deserves only a finite amount of punishment, it doesn’t follow that therefore hell would be of finite duration.

A second possible way to respond to this would be to say that the damned in hell freely choose to remain there, that God would permit them into heaven if they would repent and be saved. But in fact they choose not to. As I say, the damned in hell grow even more intensive in their hatred of God and their rejection of him. They don’t want God. As Jean Paul Sartre said, the door to hell is locked from the inside, not from the outside. People separate themselves from God irrevocably.

But finally, the third thing I’d say is that I think we need to question this presupposition that sins only deserve a finite amount of punishment. Even if we concede that, say, sins like adultery and theft and lying only merit a finite amount of punishment, I think the sin of rejecting God himself is a sin of a quite different nature. These other sins have been taken care of by Christ’s death on the cross. He’s died for those sins and they are covered. Those sins are not really what separates us from God. What really separates us from God is the sin of rejecting Christ himself, the sin of rejecting God. That is a sin of infinite gravity and proportion, because it is the creature rejecting the infinite Creator himself. It is a sin, therefore, of enormous seriousness that I think could well merit eternal punishment.

Any one of these three answers would help to show that God is not unjust in his eternal punishment of persons who reject him forever and separate themselves from him.

Question: If God is all-powerful, then why would he be subject to a balance?

Dr. Craig: Well, the issue here is the issue of human freedom. If it’s possible that God has created beings that are free, then it’s logically impossible for him to control how they behave or to make them do what he always desires. God’s omnipotence doesn’t mean he can do logical impossibilities. Christian theologians have never thought that God’s being omnipotent means that God can do things like make a square triangle or a married bachelor, because those are not things; those are just incoherent combinations of words. There is no such thing as a square triangle. So this isn’t any inhibition on God’s power.

But in exactly the same way, to make someone freely do something is a logical contradiction. If God creates creatures in his image who are endowed with genuine freedom, then he cannot make them all freely love him and receive his grace. He is going to give them the freedom to in effect choose their own destiny, to damn themselves forever, if this is what these creatures freely choose to do. Now, by his grace he’ll try to prevent this; he’ll provide sufficient grace for salvation. But he’s not going to force himself upon them. And as I say, as long as this is even possible, it shows that there isn’t any logical incompatibility between these propositions that we’ve been talking about.

Question: The Scripture says that God has bound all men over to disobedience so that he might have mercy on them. It says God is the author of salvation and that regeneration precedes faith. It’s an act of God’s grace given to man; it’s not man’s will, his decision. As John 1 states, man is not born of his own decision; he is born from God, and it’s God’s decision.

The argument that “an all-loving God has to save everyone” is inconsistent with what Scripture reveals-that we’re all sinners in Adam, everyone deserves hell, and that’s justice. Hell is to God’s glory because it’s a just place. It accentuates his holiness, his justice. And God will have mercy on whom he will have mercy. It has nothing to do with man’s will. How would you respond to that?

Dr. Craig: I think we all recognize that this is an issue on which Christians disagree. Some Christians take a more Calvinistic perspective; others, like myself, take a more Wesleyan perspective. But I think that even if you are of a Calvinistic persuasion, what I’ve said can still be helpful. Why? Because, as I said, in order for this argument to work, C doesn’t need to be true; it only needs to be possible. As long as it’s even possible, it shows that A and B are completely compatible with each other.

So even though the Calvinists will say, “No, I think C is false,” that doesn’t affect the validity of my argument, because all it requires is that it be possible. I don’t think we need to try to settle here the differences between Calvinism and Wesleyanism. But this material isn’t useless if you’re a Calvinist. Quite the contrary. As long as this is even possible, it shows that there is no incompatibility between God’s being all-powerful and all-loving and some people never hearing the gospel and being lost.

Question: I liked your story about Walking Bear, a man who through general revelation found a reverence for God, a harmony with his surroundings, and a compassion and goodwill for his fellow man. Why couldn’t there be men like this who freely accept God and become leaders of others, using that general revelation to teach others about what they have found, even though they have never heard or been exposed to the gospel of Christ?

Dr. Craig: I think that is possible. But I don’t think, on the basis of what the Scripture says, that there’s much grounds for optimism that this has in fact happened. I mean, it’s possible, but I’m not optimistic. I really do hope that I’ll see Aristotle in heaven. When I read the works of Aristotle and what he wrote about God, I just hope that this guy makes it. But I don’t think that we can be presumptuous. I say that simply on the basis of the passages of Scripture that I quoted. Generally speaking, general revelation isn’t availed of by folks. Instead they tend to ignore it and pursue gods of their own making and flout the moral law. But I do think it’s possible.

Question: If God is all-fair, why wouldn’t he give everybody a choice to reject or accept the gospel? Why would he just create them for hell or heaven? Why isn’t everybody given a choice?

Dr. Craig: God has given us a historical revelation in the incarnation of Christ and the birth of the Christian faith. But by the very nature of a historical revelation, some people aren’t going to hear about it until it spreads throughout the globe. Due to the very nature of a historical revelation, which Christianity is, it’s going to take some time for folks to hear about it. But what I’m suggesting is that God in his providence could so order the world that anybody who would respond to the message is born at a time and place in history where he does hear it. So these folks who never hear about it would only be people who wouldn’t have responded to it even if they had heard it.

Let me give you an analogy. Suppose somebody had a project that he needed an epoxy glue for. In epoxy glue you have two parts; one tube is the glue and the other is the setting agent that makes the glue set and turn hard. You’ve got to have both parts to make the epoxy glue work. Well, suppose you don’t have the setting agent to make the glue harden. Then there’s no reason to get all worked up and hot and bothered about applying the other part, because it won’t do any good anyway. So in that sense, there isn’t any reason to think that these folks who would reject the gospel if they heard it need to hear it, because they would reject it anyway if they heard it. They lack the second part of the epoxy glue.

All people are given a chance. Through general revelation and conscience they are given a full chance to appropriate God’s salvation. God’s grace is given to them. In fact, many of the lost might receive more grace and opportunity than some of the saved. But I don’t see that if God knew that they would reject the gospel that God is unfair for not giving them the gospel. It would only be unloving if he failed to give them the gospel and he knew they would have responded to it if they heard it. I could see how you would think that would be unloving, if God knew that a person would respond to the gospel if they heard it, but he didn’t share it with them. But if God knows that it would be futile to do so, I don’t see that it’s unfair for him not to share this futile message with that person. And remember, this person still does have, through general revelation, full opportunity to respond and be saved. So I guess I just don’t see that that’s unfair.

Question: You said a couple times that God might have thought it was worth it to create this world for the multitudes that would be saved, although in giving us freewill some people would still freely reject Christ. But it seems that the balance is more the other way around, that he created multitudes who are lost so that some might be saved. Why this balance rather than something that’s more favorable for the general population?

Dr. Craig: As I said, it may well be, given human depravity and sin, that this is the optimal balance God could get. I don’t think any of us know exactly what that balance is. When I talk about the actual world I mean the future as well, and none of us know what will happen in the future. But I’m suggesting the optimal balance may be the balance in this world, and that if he could have gotten more saved with less lost, he would have done so. I don’t think God can be faulted for choosing the world having an optimal balance between saved and lost.

And if you say, “Well gee, why is the balance so bad?” The answer is, it’s not God’s fault; it’s our fault. It’s because we reject his grace and forgiveness and condemn ourselves. So if you want to lay the blame at someone’s doorstep for the optimal balance not being better, it needs to be laid at the footstep of humanity, of each individual. I don’t mean humanity in general. I mean each individual.

Question: I’m somewhat concerned about your idea of salvation through general revelation. I was hoping you could elaborate on how that’s consistent with the idea of salvation by grace through faith in God.

Dr. Craig: Well, it wouldn’t be through works; it wouldn’t be through living up to the standards of the moral law. It would be by recognizing one’s culpability and failure to live up to the moral law written on your heart, and flinging yourself upon the mercy of this unknown God, this Creator God of the universe, for forgiveness. So it would still be through a faith response to God’s general revelation in nature and in conscience.

You have people like this in the Old Testament, people like Job, Melchizedek and others, who weren’t part of the covenant family of Israel but who clearly knew God. They were simply responding to the information that God had given them. Now they clearly couldn’t have been saved apart from Christ; therefore, the benefits of Christ’s atoning death must have been applied to these folks without their having had a conscious knowledge of Christ.

I suggest it is possible there could be modern-day Jobs today. I’m not optimistic that there are very many like that, but I think it’s possible. So it wouldn’t be through works; it would be through a faith response to God’s general revelation.

Question: How would you interpret Romans 9:19-24 in the light of what you’ve said?

“One of you will say to me: ‘Then why does God still blame us? For who resists his will?’ But who are you, O man, to talk back to God? Shall what is formed say to him who formed it, ‘Why did he make me like this?’ Does not the potter have the right to make out of the same lump of clay some pottery for noble purposes and some for common use? What if God, choosing to show his wrath and make his power known, bore with great patience the objects of his wrath-prepared for destruction? What if he did this to make the riches of his glory known to the objects of his mercy, whom he prepared in advance for glory-even us, whom he also called?”

Dr. Craig: The way I understand that passage in Romans 9 is that Paul is saying God is sovereign to elect whom he wills and to not save whom he wills, that this is God’s discretion and that we can’t answer back to God. But what Paul then goes on to explain is that those whom God has chosen to elect are those who have faith in Christ Jesus. Thus in Galatians 3 he says: Therefore you see that it is men of faith who are the sons of Abraham and are heirs to the promise.

I see Romans 9 as not narrowing the scope of God’s election, but broadening it out, saying to these ethnic Jews, “You can’t claim, because of your ethnicity as Jewish people, that you alone are the elect of God and that these Gentiles are not included in God’s salvation.” Paul is saying God elects and saves whomever he wills, and he has willed to save all those who have faith in Christ Jesus, even these Gentiles, though they are not part of the ethnic people of Israel. I see it as an assertion of God’s divine sovereignty. It then needs to be asked: Who is it that God has chosen to save? It’s those who have faith in Christ. Therefore in Romans 10 he says, “Therefore, whoever calls upon the name of the Lord will be saved.”

Question: How can God be all-powerful yet allow man’s free will to limit him from creating a world where all accept Christ? Isn’t this essentially stating that man’s free will is stronger than God’s being all-powerful?

Dr. Craig: No, I don’t think so. I would go back to the answer I gave to an earlier question, that Christian theology has never asserted that omnipotence means the ability to do the logically impossible. It is logically impossible to make someone freely do something. So these are not any kind of non-logical limits on God’s power that we’re talking about here, and therefore it doesn’t in any way infringe on God’s omnipotence.

Question: What would you say to the accusation that God is arbitrary, that he has arbitrarily chosen some and not chosen others?

Dr. Craig: God is free and God is sovereign, but he is also loving and just, and he acts consistently with his own nature. The things that he does aren’t arbitrary; they are expressions of who he is as a holy and loving God. He must punish sin; he can’t just wink at sin. But being loving, he will not ignore people whom he could save if he wanted to. I take very seriously those passages in Scripture about the universal salvific will of God, that say that God desires that all men be saved and come to a knowledge of the truth. In my view that’s really true.

Now if that’s true, and God is omnipotent, the only thing that could prevent his universal salvific will from becoming true would be human freedom-that people repulse the love of God, that they throw the love of God and the grace of God out of their lives, they refuse to acquiesce to it, and so thereby condemn themselves and separate themselves from God forever. I don’t see it as any arbitrariness on God’s part at all. I see this as being an expression of his just and loving nature.

Question: It seems that we can easily explain the justice of God and the need for hell. What is unexplainable is the fact that heaven exists and that God has extended mercy in Christ. Something that hasn’t been addressed is the presupposition that God, being all-loving, is obligated to provide forgiveness at all.

Dr. Craig: That is a very good point, and I think you’re absolutely right. People always ask, “How can a loving God send people to hell?” But nobody ever asks the question, “How can an all-holy God send people to heaven?” Yet as a purely intellectual conundrum, that question is every bit as difficult. How in the world can an all-holy, all-just God send people to heaven?

The answer to both of these questions is found in Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is the embodiment of God’s justice and love. At the cross we see the justice of God, as his wrath is poured out upon sin, as Christ bears the penalty for the sins of the whole world. But we also see God’s love, as God himself becomes the sacrificial offering in Christ to make available salvation and grace for all persons.

Question: You mentioned Job and Melchizedek in the Old Testament. Job understood that someone must help us approach God. He asked, “Is there life after death? Is there one who can save us from judgment? Where do we find God?” Moses offered himself to God as a sacrifice and God said, “No way. You are not acceptable. But I will provide a sacrifice.” God did the same thing to Abraham when he offered Isaac; he said, “I will provide.” And he did provide that in Jesus Christ.

While the people in the Old Testament may not have seen Jesus Christ clearly, I believe that they looked forward to what God would provide for them in a perfect atoning sacrifice, and that’s how they were saved in the Old Testament. They may not have known this Jesus by name, but that’s how they were saved.

How much more so in our age, knowing more clearly than anyone in the Old Testament, must we say that it is impossible for someone to come to heaven and be justified before God without full faith in Jesus Christ alone. You said it’s highly unlikely. I would say it’s impossible.

Dr. Craig: Well, again, if it is impossible, that wouldn’t affect my final solution that I’ve given, which is God in his providence arranges the world such that anyone who would freely receive the gospel if he heard it is born at a time and place in history where he does hear it. So I could accept your conclusion and it would be consistent with what I’ve said. But I guess I’m not convinced that you’re right about this being impossible. There’s still around 15 percent of the world’s population who have even yet to hear the name of Jesus Christ for the first time. In a sense they’re like the people in the Old Testament who hadn’t yet heard the news of the gospel. Perhaps God has ministered to them in special ways, as he did to Job.

Don Richardson wrote a book a few years ago called Peace Child, where he says that he thinks in every people group there are redemptive stories which are analogous to the gospel story, and which prepare them to hear and understand the gospel. Maybe something like that might exist among these unreached peoples. But if you think it’s impossible, you have to deal with Romans 2:7, where Paul says, “For those who by patience in well-doing seek for glory and honor and immortality, he will give eternal life.”

Question: If man truly does have free will, then it seems contradictory that some have been elected to go to heaven and some have not been elected. It seems like the game’s already been played. God knows who’s going where, and everything we do has been ordained by God.

Dr. Craig: I understand election primarily as a corporate idea-that what God has elected is a people for himself. In the Old Testament he called out a people to be his own, and in the New Testament he calls out a people to be his church. You have all these corporate images in the Scripture-the olive tree with the branches grafted in or broken off, the building of living stones, the body with its many members, and so forth. I think that you can read the Scriptures in such a way that it is this corporate body which is the primary object of God’s election and is destined to glorification, justification and all the rest. Being a member of the corporate group, you become elect in a secondary sense. But whether or not you’re a member of that corporate body is going to depend on your faith response to the gospel. Paul says, “Whosoever will call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.”

If we understand this election to be primarily a corporate idea, then I think it’s not incompatible with freedom. Whom is is that God has chosen to save? Whom is it that he has chosen to elect? Those who have faith in Christ Jesus. That’s who he has chosen to elect and save. So I don’t think it’s incompatible.

Question: Jonathan Edwards did a marvelous job of explaining some of these apparent logical conundrums that we’ve been talking about tonight on the freedom of the will. He talked about the fact that all of us do exactly that thing which we most want to do at every moment of our lives, so we have complete freedom of our will to do that which we want to do. What we do not have freedom to do is change our fundamental nature. So what God does when we are born again is give us a new nature, where what I desire to do is different than it was before I was saved. So in that sense, it’s a monergistic work of God to save me; he does it, I have nothing to do with it. But then I do make a freewill choice to believe in Jesus Christ . But it is still irresistible grace in the sense that, having had my nature changed, there is nothing else I was going to do.

He uses similar language with regard to God’s making the statement that he “desires all to be saved.” He talks about God’s decreetive will and certain other wills. And it’s a very terrible analogy, but it’s the best I can do on the spot-it’s somewhat akin to the fact that right now I might desire a burrito, but I’m not going to go buy a burrito because it’s too far away and there’s all kinds of other things to do. So I desire it, but I don’t desire it enough to really want to go do it. So God wants all people to be saved in some sense, but in another very real sense his will is for his justice and mercy to be shown in a certain way in the plan that he has. So it’s not inconsistent for him to make a statement like, “I desire all people to be saved,” knowing fully well that that’s never going to happen.

Dr. Craig: Well, that’s what you’ve got to say from the Calvinist Reformed view. You’ve got to qualify those kinds of passages that talk about the universal salvific will of God, by either saying something like this or saying that “it doesn’t refer to all men, but maybe all sorts of men,” or something like that. But I think it’s preferable to simply take them at face value and accept them for what they seem to say.

It’s hard for me to understand how anything could stop God’s ultimate desires from being fulfilled unless it were that he created human beings with freedom to resist him. Therefore his grace wouldn’t be irresistible; otherwise, universal salvation would take place.

I realize that people have theological differences on this, but these are not differences that need to separate the brethren. What I shared can still be of value in that it does constitute a proof of the compatibility of God’s being all-loving and all-powerful, and some people never hearing the gospel and being saved. Regardless of your theological persuasion, as long as this alternative is even possible it defeats the argument of the religious pluralist which is so rampant in our culture today.