John Stackhouse is a professor of theology and culture at Regent College in Vancouver, BC. He is part of the Christian Vision Project, and he writes in favor of “inclusivism” here. Inclusivism, as he defines it, says that there are many outside the Christian faith who are saved because of their demeanor of faith, without having heard of Jesus.
What I intend to do here is not provide a point by point refutation, but rather to provide a few contextualizing observations about this kind of inclusivist thinking.
First, I believe that the proclamation of the gospel is necessary to salvation. I believe this, but I am not superstitious about it. By this I mean that I am fine with the statement in the Westminster Confession that outside the church there is no ordinary possibility of salvation. In extraordinary situations, God may save how He pleases, and none of us should set up to lecture Him over this incipient liberalism. But having acknowledged this, we have to remember He tells us in His Word how it ordinarily goes — that is where we find our operating orders. And in His Word He tells us that sincere Hindus are dead in their transgressions and sins, and not that they are making their way to heaven as best they know how.
This relates to the central confusion in Stackhouse’s version of the inclusivist position.
The analogy must be pressed, because one of the central features of our sinful nature is its capacity for blame-shifting. If someone who has never heard of Jesus lives his entire life as a grasping, petty, censorious, lustful, greedy fool, what is the basis of his condemnation? At the judgment, he will not be asked, “Why didn’t you ever hear about Jesus?” His condemnation is on the basis of his evil works, and he knew all about those.
Ironically, this is why the inclusivist position requires us to start minimizing (in our own imaginations) how screwed up the world actually is. If we believe that millions of Hindus, Muslims, and Buddhists are groping their way to God in the dark, then we have to look out at the world as though it were jammed full of good intentions. And the problem is that it isn’t.
So we don’t proclaim Jesus because we are fixing the problem of “not having heard about Jesus.” We proclaim Jesus because we are addressing the problem of death, genocide, hatred, murder, rape, slave prostitution, senseless war, snarling greed, and as they say on television, much, much more. The problem with the inclusivist position is not that it is eager for the people to be included — every Christian wants that. The problem is that when we define the standard downward like this, at the end of the day we find that we have included much more than the people — we have opened the door to great wickedness as well. This may sound outlandish, but there it is. Tender-hearted accommodation leads to great hardness of heart. And a hardline conservatism at this point, ironically, is tender-hearted.