If you have ever attended a Christian church, I hope that you would have heard things like:

• "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).
• "God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us" (Romans 5:8).
• "God showed how much he loved us by sending his one and only Son into the world so that we might have eternal life through him. This is real love—not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as a sacrifice to take away our sins" (1 John 4:9-10, NLT).

These are some of the clearest verses in the Bible that say that God's offer of eternal life is open to everyone and is free to accept, simply by believing that these verses are actually true. This is the core message of Christianity, also called the gospel, a.k.a. the "good news".

But does God really want to save everyone? If we say yes, then does that mean that everyone will be saved? Or if not everyone will be saved, is there something that prevents God from saving everyone? And what happens to people who never heard the gospel before they died?

These are challenging questions. If you are a Christian, you have probably either wondered about them, or been asked about them by someone else.

These questions have important implications for how Christians understand the gospel and how we share the gospel with others. Our answers to them will both affect and reflect our understanding of God's good and perfect character, and thus, this topic is related to the question of theodicy, which has been something I've been focused on studying for the past eight years of my theological education.

After writing my PhD dissertation on Jonathan Edwards' understanding of predestination, I think I've finally solidified my answer to these questions. In my next few blog posts I will try to explain my answer in more detail.

I hope you'll find my answer to be encouraging, Biblically-sound, theologically persuasive, and that it will give you a passion to share the gospel with others, while still having hope for those who never heard it in their lifetimes.

My Answer: Christian Inclusivism

To get right down to business, I'll give you my shortest answers to the four questions I asked earlier:

1. Does God want to save everyone? Yes, the Bible says so.
2. Will God save everyone? Not according to Scripture.
3. Why can't God save everyone? Because God is Love.
4. What about people who never heard the gospel before they died? They will get an opportunity to hear it and believe it at some point.

In essence, this means I want to advocate for a position called Christian inclusivism. Inclusivism is only one of several possible answers that Christians may give to these questions. The alternatives to inclusivism are exclusivism, universalism, and pluralism.

Here's how I would briefly describe each of these positions:

• Exclusivism: only people who believed in Jesus and/or the only true God during their earthly lives will be eternally saved.
• Inclusivism: Christianity is the only true faith, but non-Christians can still be saved even if they didn't know about Jesus or believe in him during their earthly lives.
• Pluralism: all religions lead people to the same God and teach the same core values, so any religious person can be saved.
• Universalism: everyone will be saved, eventually.

The Bible teaches that after death, people will only experience one of two possible outcomes: eternal life in a resurrected body, or eternal destruction that causes them to cease to exist. Thus, Christians should care very much about the destiny of our friends and family members.

Regarding the question of whether God will save everyone, I believe that Christians end up taking one of the above four positions, whether we're fully aware of it or not. Yet as I will explain over the next few blog posts, I think that exclusivism, universalism, and pluralism all have more significant theological problems than inclusivism does.

Accepting some form of inclusivism can also give Christians a sense of hope and peace as we continue to witness to and pray for our loved ones who have not yet believed in Jesus. Furthermore, in order for Christians to take all the verses in the Bible seriously and to uphold God's perfectly good and loving character, I think we actually need to have some sort of theory of inclusivism.

For now, in the rest of this post I want to explain why I reject exclusivism due to a number of practical and theological problems. In my next post, I'll take on universalism, and after that, I'll discuss pluralism. Finally, in a future post I'll give an outline of my own theory of Christian inclusivism.

Does God Want To Save Everyone?

The first question we need to answer is whether God truly wants everyone to have the possibility of being eternally saved. How we answer this question will significantly influence our theology, and the range of possible answers effectively divides Christians into two main groups:

1. Those who say yes, God does want to save everyone and so everyone truly has the opportunity to be saved. The only reason that anyone comes to believe in Jesus is due to the continual working of the Holy Spirit in their hearts to draw all people to Jesus, but people can choose to resist this supernatural influence, thus rejecting God's offer of salvation.

2. Those who say no, God does not want to save everyone. Instead, God only wants to save a special group of people (a.k.a. "the elect"), and usually, it is claimed that this special group of people is only a small group when compared to all people who have ever lived. Supposedly, Jesus only died for the sins of this special group of people. God then makes sure that these special people will hear the gospel and believe it through the work of the Holy Spirit, who will guarantee that these people come to believe in Jesus at some point in their lives. People who are not specially chosen by God will never believe the gospel, and so they will face the eternal consequences for their lack of faith.

Generally, Christians who agree with point number 1 tend to uphold the role of human free will as being the deciding factor in why some people are saved and others are not. Often, these Christians identify as Arminians or open theists, but they may also be Catholics, Wesleyans, Methodists, Baptists, and Pentecostals.

Alternatively, Christians who agree with point number 2 will strongly emphasize God's sovereign choice as being the deciding factor for why some people are saved and others are not. This idea is called double predestination, and Christians who uphold this idea often identify as followers of John Calvin, Martin Luther, or the early church theologian Augustine, and are often found in the Reformed and Lutheran branches of Christianity, but also among some groups of Baptists.

As I've talked about in a few past blog posts here and here, I believe that there are too many problems with the theory of double predestination for me to accept it as the reason for why some people will be eternally saved while others are not.

Additionally, if we go back to the original question of whether God really wants to save everyone, I think the Bible provides an incredibly clear answer:

God "desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth" (1 Timothy 2:3-4). God "does not want anyone to be destroyed, but wants everyone to repent" (2 Peter 3:9, NLT).

But surely, everyone doesn't include extremely bad people, right?

"Do you think that I like to see wicked people die? says the Sovereign Lord. Of course not! I want them to turn from their wicked ways and live" (Ezekiel 18:23, NLT).

Can we confirm this?

"As surely as I live, says the Sovereign Lord, I take no pleasure in the death of wicked people. I only want them to turn from their wicked ways so they can live" (Ezekiel 33:11, NLT).

How much more clear does God have to be that he definitely does not want anyone to be eternally destroyed?

Unfortunately, some Christian theologians like Jonathan Edwards have taught that God wants to send most sinners to hell, which is the exact opposite of what these verses above say.

Jonathan Edwards Rejected The Idea That God Wants to Save Everyone

At the end of his book Freedom of the Will, Edwards concluded that although,

Christ in some sense may be said to die for all, and to redeem all visible Christians, yea, the whole world by his death; yet there must be something particular in the design of his death, with respect to such as he intended should actually be saved thereby. As appears by what has been now shown, God has the actual salvation or redemption of a certain number in his proper, absolute design, and of a certain number only.1

Yet in my research on Edwards, I couldn't find any instances where he attempted to explain or reinterpret any of the verses like the ones above that blatantly contradict his statement.

This is particularly strange given that Edwards has been called “the most formidable defender of Calvinism in the history of North America”.2 Is the best defender of Calvinism in North America really unable or unwilling to explain how he understood these verses? That seems to be a major red flag that there's a serious problem with his theology, and by extension, with Calvinism itself.

Edwards certainly was aware of these verses, since he cited 1 Timothy 2:3-4 and 2 Peter 3:9 a few times in some of his writings.3 Yet in these instances he didn't attempt to explain these verses in any further detail. Thus it is unclear what Edwards actually thought these verses meant.

Of course, I've seen various other Calvinistic authors attempt to explain these verses in ways that are compatible with double predestination. However, the only way they can do this is by reinterpreting "all," "everyone," and "anyone" to actually mean only "some people," or even "only a few people". However, I don't see any justification for these interpretations in these verses themselves.

An example of such an unusual interpretation is found when Edwards tried to refute John Taylor’s universalistic interpretations of Romans 5:18 and 1 Corinthians 15:21–22 which seem to say that Christ died for everyone. To do this, Edwards said that the word "all" in these verses doesn't really mean all. Instead, Edwards made a distinction between "all" who are "in Adam" (i.e., every human) and "all" who are "in Christ" (i.e., only those people who are saved).4

Yet Edwards' approach is ironic, because elsewhere Edwards protested when Taylor suddenly interprets a word in a different sense than he interpreted it earlier in the same verse, although this is precisely what Edwards just did here.5

Edwards also flip-flopped on the issue of whether Christ truly died for everyone within a single sermon!

In "The Many Mansions," Edwards first said that,

There is mercy enough in God to admit an innumerable multitude into heaven: there is mercy enough for all. And there is merit enough in Christ to purchase heavenly happiness for millions of millions, for all men that ever were, are, or shall be. And there is a sufficiency in the fountain of heaven’s happiness to supply, and fill, and satisfy all: and there is in all respects enough for the happiness of all.6

Sounds good, right? But then suddenly, a few paragraphs later, he said that "when heaven was made, it was intended and prepared for all those particular persons that God had from eternity designed to save."7 I.e., not everyone.

Then at the end of his sermon, Edwards evangelistically appealed to sinners to "seek heaven" for "there is suitable provision there for you." He argued that because God invites sinners to believe in the gospel, then each person is actually so invited, for God cannot lie.8

Yet if double predestination is true, then God actually hasn't genuinely invited everyone to believe the gospel, because advocates of double predestination claim that God only gives the ability to believe and accept his offer to the elect people that God wants to save.

Or at best, God's offer of salvation to the non-elect would be as genuine as a party host who silently displays an invitation to a blind man who cannot read it, yet the host still claims that the blind man was properly 'invited' to the party.9

Edwards' sermon here shows the contradictions that preachers who believe in double predestination face when they try to be evangelists.

Ultimately, I believe that Edwards' statement that God only wants to save a certain number of people was based not on Scripture, but on his philosophical assumptions about God's sovereignty and God's foreknowledge. From these assumptions, Edwards thought that God controls absolutely everything, and so there is no room for human free will to explain why some people are saved and others aren't.

Thus, Edwards reasoned that if not everyone is saved, that's because God doesn't want to save them, since "we may justly infer what God intends by what he actually does, because he does nothing inadvertently, or without design."10

Based on the extremely clear Bible verses that we looked at earlier, though, I am not convinced that Edwards' view is Biblically accurate. I also think his claim that God wants to send most people to hell is the biggest contradiction in his theology, which I discuss here.

However, the problem that Jonathan Edwards faced about whether God truly wants to save everyone is also faced by Christians who identify as exclusivists. That's because even if exclusivists don't overtly claim to believe in double predestination, I think it is actually implied in their theology, as I'll explain in the next section.

The Problem With Exclusivism

If inclusivists say that non-Christians can still be saved even if they didn't know about Jesus or believe in him during their earthly lives, then exclusivism is the exact opposite. Christian exclusivists say that everyone who never believed in Jesus during their lifetimes are automatically destined for hell.

A short case for exclusivism could be made by appealing to the Biblical statement that "each person is destined to die once and after that comes judgment" (Hebrews 9:27, NLT).

Jesus' parable of Lazarus and the rich man (Luke 16:19-31) might also appear to be evidence for this position if it is taken literally. In this parable, once once the rich man died, there was no way out of the fire he found himself stuck in, and all he cared about was that his living family members would change their minds so they wouldn't end up in the same place.

Other instances where the Bible talks about individuals facing God's final judgment and hell are often read similarly by exclusivists to imply that after death there is no chance for anyone to repent or change their eternal destinies.

The strictest proponents of exclusivism would also say that individuals who accept the gospel in their lifetimes have to continue believing in Jesus until they die. If they fall away from faith, they will also end up in hell. (I would strongly disagree, though.)

Exclusivists do make exceptions for people who died before Jesus was resurrected, provided that these people knew something about the only true God and had faith in him. Some of these people are listed in Hebrews 11, such as Abel, Enoch, Noah, and Abraham. Job is another example, because even though he didn't know all the details, he confessed that "For I know that my Redeemer lives, and at the last he will stand upon the earth. And after my skin has been thus destroyed, yet in my flesh I shall see God" (Job 19:25-26).

Many exclusivists also make exceptions for children who died before they were able to make a personal decision to believe in Jesus. Exceptions are also usually made for people who never had the mental capacity to understand and respond to the gospel. However, exclusivists' arguments for why God can make exceptions for these sorts of people are not always theologically persuasive.11

For example, when talking about the salvation of children, some Christians argue that as long as children die before they reach the 'age of accountability', these children will be saved.12

But this raises questions about exactly at what age someone reaches this age of accountability, or how much mental capacity is necessary to understand and believe the gospel. Some exclusivists might argue that only God knows these things for certain, since they could be different for each person.

The practical problem with this idea is that if a Christian's child dies, it would be difficult for a pastor to reassure the parent that they will see their child again in heaven, since no one but God can know if the child was past his or her personal 'age of accountability' or had the mental capacity to believe in Jesus.

Even worse, this idea could lead to the mistaken belief that it could be a loving thing to kill a child before they reach the age of accountability in order to ensure that the child will go to heaven.13

So already, it seems there are some major questions and difficulties for Christian exclusivism.

One possible benefit of exclusivism is that it can strongly encourage evangelism. If we truly believe that every person who doesn't personally profess belief in Christ in this life is going to face eternal destruction, then it seems that Christians should be constantly preaching to every non-Christian we come across that they need to believe in Jesus. Otherwise, aren't we all horrible people who don't care that someone might drop dead at any moment without having had a chance to accept the gospel?

I used to think this way, and I often felt guilty because I wasn't sharing the gospel with everyone I knew. I felt I was selfish because I usually cared too much about what someone might think of me to risk ruining their impression of me by sharing the gospel with them. I worried that if my friend, unbelieving family member, or even a random person I passed on the street would die without ever hearing the message that I could have shared with them, then God would hold me accountable for why that person ended up in hell. I thought this way of thinking was supported by verses like Ezekiel 33:8-9.

However, an even more serious problem for exclusivism is that if it were true, then everyone who lived in times or places where they weren't able to know anything about the only true God or the gospel would seem to be automatically condemned to hell.

If so, then it seems that we're back to double predestination, because it is God who chooses when and where groups of people will live (Acts 17:26). Yet how could God justly eternally destroy such people for not believing in Jesus, when they never had a chance to hear about him?

Exclusivists often reply to this question by claiming that all people have had access to 'general revelation', which is the knowledge about God that everyone should be able to gain from looking at nature, as Paul says:

For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. Ever since the creation of the world his eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made. So they are without excuse; for though they knew God, they did not honour him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their senseless minds were darkened. (Romans 1:19-21)

Based on this verse, exclusivists argue that general revelation is only enough to condemn people and not enough to save them, because nature can't teach anything about Jesus or the gospel (a.k.a. 'special revelation').14

But the problem for exclusivists is even more difficult, because they also need to account for everyone who might have heard the gospel but who didn't understand it or who rejected it prematurely. For example, Thomas B. Talbott argues,

In this life, of course, we rarely, if ever, choose in a context of full clarity. We all emerge and start making choices in a context of ambiguity, ignorance, and illusion, where God remains at least partly hidden from us. But that merely makes matters worse.... For insofar as God remains hidden from us and we do not fully understand the true nature of God or the consequences of separating ourselves from him, we are in no position to reject the true God at all. We may reject a caricature of God, as frequently happens in a context of ambiguity, ignorance, and misperception; but we are in no position to reject the true God until our ignorance has been removed and our misjudgments have been corrected.15

I think Talbott raises a good point here. Many Christians know of people who have been turned away from Christianity by seeing negative Christian examples in the world, or who might have been personally hurt by someone who identified as a Christian. Some of these people's negative impressions of the gospel or of Christians could be so strong that it permanently turns them away from ever reconsidering their need for Jesus and his amazing free offer of eternal life.

How could it be fair for a Christian who hurt someone or presented the gospel badly to be eternally saved, but the person who they hurt or turned away from Jesus is eternally destroyed?

We might also picture the scenario of a woman who has never heard the gospel. She arrives in Toronto, and happens to walk by a street preacher in a busy downtown square. Over the megaphone, she hears John 3:16. Yet as she steps out onto Yonge street, she is hit by a city bus and is killed instantly. Would it be right for God to eternally destroy her because she didn't immediately respond to the gospel the very first time she heard it?

Thus, exclusivism not only puts a lot of pressure on Christians to share the gospel, but also pressures us to make sure we share the gospel perfectly, and also live perfect lives in order to make sure we never do anything that might turn someone against Christianity or the gospel.

But since Christians will always still be imperfect in this life (Romans 7:14-25), and nobody has all of their theology perfectly straightened out (1 Corinthians 13:12), then it seems that God is expecting perfect performance from imperfect people. Our failures then lead Christians to worry that we might be the reason why someone who God wants to save will be eternally destroyed.

An easy way to get around all this guilt and fear would be to say that if God truly wants these people to be saved, then he'll get through to them somehow before they die. If not, then maybe God doesn't want to save them after all, and they really are predestined to be eternally destroyed in hell?

Yet because of the verses shown earlier, we know this conclusion can't possibly be true.

A Critique of William Lane Craig's Appeal to Middle Knowledge

Unfortunately, double predestination is implied even by exclusivists like William Lane Craig who advocate for free will, unlike Jonathan Edwards, John Calvin, and Martin Luther who rejected the idea of free will and argued for double predestination.

When Craig attempts to explain why it is that not everyone will be saved by appealing to the concept of God's 'middle knowledge', Craig also ends up advocating for a theory of double predestination.

Middle knowledge is the idea that God knows exactly what each of us would freely do in any situation we might be placed in. So Craig asks:

Why God, if he desires all people to be saved, should create a world in which so many people are lost and eternally damned. For by his middle knowledge, God knew under what circumstances any person he might create would freely receive Christ. So why did he not plan his creation of persons and circumstances in such a way that everyone would freely be saved?16

Craig's answer is that perhaps it is impossible for God to create a world where everyone freely believes in Jesus, because there might be some people who would never freely receive Christ in any circumstance.

Basically, he says that in any world God could create, "some people, no matter how much the Spirit of God worked on their hearts, no matter how favorable their upbringing, no matter how many times or ways they heard the gospel, would still refuse to bow the knee and give their lives to Christ."17

But if God truly wants everyone to be saved, then why would God create these people that God knows will never accept the gospel? Craig argues that it might be impossible for God to create a world where no one would reject God's offer of salvation. Or, if God could create such a world, there might be very few people in it.

So Craig theorizes that God might have decided that it's better to create a lot of people, in order to maximize the number of people who God knows will be saved, even if it means that God also has to create many people who God knows will never accept Christ in any circumstance.18

However, if God really knows through his middle knowledge who will freely accept him and who won't, then if God chooses to create people that God knows will never accept him, God is effectively predestining them to hell. Thus, Craig ends up indirectly arguing for double predestination. this is why I think the idea of middle knowledge is ultimately deterministic even if it acknowledges free will, as I've talked about here.

(A a side note, Arminians who believe in God's perfect foreknowledge of everyone's free choices also have a similar problem, because if God perfectly foreknows that some people definitely will never accept the gospel, but God creates them anyway, then God is effectively predestining those people to hell.)

But as difficult as Craig's theory already is, Craig goes on to make things even worse. This happens when he suggests that:

It is possible that God in his providence so arranged the world that those who never in fact hear the gospel are persons who would not respond to it if they did hear it. God brings the gospel to all those who he knows will respond to it if they hear it. Thus the motivation for the missionary enterprise is to be God's ambassadors in bringing the gospel to those whom God has arranged to freely receive it when they hear it. No one who would respond if he [or she] heard it will be lost.19

This part of Craig's argument is troubling, because for large portions of history the gospel was mostly limited to certain parts of the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe.

Does Craig really think that the Incas, Australian Aborigines, and the ancient Chinese, among others, were entirely composed of people who would have rejected the gospel in any possible circumstance? What about people living today on North Sentinel Island—an extremely isolated tribe of people who are hostile to all outsiders?

Yet the Bible says that in the new heavens and new Earth, there will be people from every tribe, nation, language, and people group (Revelation 5:9-10, 7:9). This must include people who lived in times or places where Christians or Jews had not yet sent missionaries, and who had no access to the Bible.

Exclusivism seems to deny that such a situation is possible, and so it fails because it cannot handle all the Biblical evidence. Craig's theory about middle knowledge fails for the exact same reason.

Conclusion

Therefore, as much as I love the passion that exclusivists often feel to share the gospel with others, I think exclusivism isn't the best position for Christians to take. It has too many practical problems, and isn't compatible with the Biblical truths that God wants to save all people, and that at least one person from every single tribe, nation, language, and people group will be eternally saved.

The only alternatives to exclusivism are either universalism, pluralism, or inclusivism. For this reason, Christians who believe that God truly wants to save everyone might be drawn to these options.

However, both universalism and pluralism have their own problems, as I will talk about in future blog posts. As a result, I think that Christians need to have some sort of Biblically-supported and theologically-sound theory of inclusivism. This is a challenge which I hope to make an attempt at in a future blog post.

Footnotes:

• 1. Jonathan Edwards, Freedom of the Will, in The Works of Jonathan Edwards Online, Volume 1, ed. Paul Ramsey (Jonathan Edwards Center: Yale University, 2008), 435. In the rest of these footnotes I will refer to The Works of Jonathan Edwards as WJE, followed by the volume number and omitting the editors, for brevity. All of these sources can be found online at Yale's Jonathan Edwards Center website.
• 2. Mark A. Noll, “Edwards, Jonathan,” in The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Modern Christian Thought, ed. Alister E. McGrath et al. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993) 145.
• 3. These are found in Jonathan Edwards' sermon "The Dreadful Silence of the Lord," in WJE 19: 111. He also mentions 2 Peter 3:9 in passing in "End of Creation," in WJE 8: 504 and “Miscellanies,” no. 669 in WJE 18: 214.
• 4. Jonathan Edwards, Original Sin, in WJE 3: 322–325.
• 5. Jonathan Edwards, Original Sin, in WJE 3: 331.
• 6. Jonathan Edwards, "The Many Mansions," in WJE 19: 739.
• 7. Jonathan Edwards, "The Many Mansions," in WJE 19: 740.
• 8. Jonathan Edwards, "The Many Mansions," in WJE 19: 742–743.
• 9. Jerry L. Walls, Does God Love Everyone?: The Heart of What is Wrong with Calvinism (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2016), 19.
• 10. Jonathan Edwards, "End of Creation," in WJE 8: 427.
• 11. Randy Alcorn, “Do Infants Go to Heaven When They Die?” Eternal Perspective Ministries, January 5, 2010.
• 12. F. Leroy Forlines, Classical Arminianism (Nashville, TN: Randall House Publishers, 2011), 236-246.
• 13. If we think no parent would act like this, it actually happened in the sad example of Andrea Yates, who drowned her five children because she believed it would save them from going to hell. Cynthia Mcfadden, "Yates: I'm Saving My Kids From Hell", ABC News, June 14, 2002.
• 14. Francis Chan and Preston Sprinkle, Erasing Hell (Colorado Springs, CO: David C. Cook, 2011), 158-161.
• 15. Thomas B. Talbott, "Response by Thomas B. Talbott" in Perspectives on Election: 5 Views, ed. Chad Owen Brand (Nashville, TN: B&H Publishing Group, 2006), 144.
• 16. William Lane Craig, The Only Wise God: The Compatibility of Divine Foreknowledge and Human Freedom (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2000), 145.
• 17. William Lane Craig, The Only Wise God, 147.
• 18. William Lane Craig, The Only Wise God, 147-150.
• 19. William Lane Craig, The Only Wise God, 151.