The Missionary Question

In evangelical circles, the scope of the missionary question is VASTLY understated. In the conventional formulation the question is, "Are the people in remote areas who have never heard the gospel or seen a Bible condemned to hell?"

The idea is that, despite the determined efforts of evangelicals to reach the entire world, some small remnant will not be reached. Before considering the question of how many humans the missionary question applies to, let us first consider the position of any individual within the group that is not reached.

The idea that God would condemn someone who had never been offered a chance to receive Christ to eternal hell is a troubling one. Despite the rigid dogmatism of evangelicals on the requirements of being saved, most cannot conceive that God could be so "unfair". Therefore they abandon their central claim as to what one must do to be saved and assume under the mantle of "mystery" that some other mechanism of communication between God and the unfortunate heathen must be operational. Some suggest that faith will be accepted in lieu of the cleansing righteousness of Christ. If so, the faith must be very undifferentiated as no heathen has acquired an identifiable Christian faith directly from God. They have all received it from Christians.


So how many humans have lived without exposure to the knowledge that one must confess Jesus as a personal savior in order to be saved?

1) Even if we accept the 6,000 year old young Earth, then over 2/3 of the time that man was on Earth was before Jesus even lived.

2) Centuries passed before a dominant strain emerged from the hundreds of forms of Christianity. Unfortunately, according to evangelicals, the Orthodox and Catholics are wrong with respect to many teachings, including salvation. It's hard to see how peoples salvation prospects benefited from being taught a "false" method for over a millennium.

3) In recent centuries Christianity again exploded into thousands of sects. In the last two centuries, a small minority of Christians in some of these sects got salvation "right": accept Jesus as your personal saviour to gain the promise of heaven. So in over 96% of the supposed 6,000 years of human life on Earth, no one heard the true gospel message.

4) Over 50% of pregnancies in the US end in miscarriages. Presumably the miscarriage rate in the third world and previous centuries is probably higher. Before the twentieth century, the survival rate for children was generally less than 50%. Therefore, in rough terms about 75% of what the evangelicals count as human lives never lived long enough to hear and understand the gospel.

5) Hearing the gospel has been considered up to now as a black and white issue, either you hear it or you don't. But what if the gospel you were raised to believe is a false one? Might you be at a disadvantage in recognizing the true gospel? What if you are hearing two or three or fifty different accounts of how to please God and attain salvation?

6) Imagine that you are given five different gospels and five minutes later you are killed. How likely is it that you have separated truth from half-truth in time to confess Jesus and be saved? The amount of time you are alive on this Earth compared to the eternity that you will spend either exalting in heaven or burning in hell is a smaller fraction than is one second compared to a billion trillion years. As it is fundamentally unfair to be allowed one second to make a decision that will effect you for a billion trillion years (should you live so long), it is fundamentally unfair to have a few decades to make a decision that bears consequences for all eternity.

So, given the tiny fraction of humans who have had a chance to understand or even hear the gospel and the then infinitesimally smaller fraction of our eternal lives that we are allowed to consider the matter, the missionary question becomes a question about every human, not just an imagined tiny fraction. If you believe that it is unfair for a completely ignorant heathen, a retarded adult or a baby to go to hell, the honest extension of this belief is that it is unfair for anyone to go to hell.