The problem with asking questions about the “minimum amount” of orthodoxy it takes to get somebody into heaven is that it treats human beings like machines, and ultimately, it tends to reduce salvation to a matter of works. God saves us by His grace, on the basis of the death and resurrection of Jesus, and nothing else. When He saves us, and we go on to live our lives, we know from the Scriptures what sort of thing to expect, such as the fruit of the Spirit. In cases where these are egregiously absent, and the works of the flesh are egregiously present, all said works of the flesh drunk and downtown, shooting out the street lights, the Church has the authority to declare that such a person is outside the communion of the saints. But even there, the Church does not have authority to pronounce on that person’s election. That is not within our competence to know.
When we ask if someone can be saved without knowledge of the Deity of Christ, the answer is sure. Fertilized eggs that die before they implant in the womb can be saved, right? And they don’t know any of the catechism. And it won’t do to wave this off as a “special case” scenario. For all we know, the majority of people in heaven are in that category. And why do we persist in treating the life and death issues surrounding our covenant children as somehow off the table in this discussion? They are sinners, they are descended from Adam, they can be regenerated and saved. Now, are they saved by grace, or are they saved by understanding they are saved by grace? Clearly it is the former — they don’t understand anything.
This does not mean that everything is absolutely up for grabs. Whether someone has a correct grasp of the gospel matters a great deal — at his ordination exam. At the great presbyterial banquet, I wouldn’t let anybody into the kitchen to cook if he did not know all about the Deity of Christ, the hypostatic union, the triune nature of God, the substitutionary death of Christ on the cross, His resurrection from the dead, and so on. But would I let people into the banquet to eat if they did not know about these things? Absolutely — the more they come, the more we feed them. And because we keep a close eye on the cooks, we feed them good stuff.
This is the besetting sin of conservative Reformed evangelicals. They think you are not qualified to eat until you are qualified to cook. And we scratch our heads over the dismal results, and conclude that we need to pray for revival. But, as Tozer once put it, if revival means more of what we have now, we most emphatically do not need revival. We don’t need revival at all, frankly. What we need is reformation. One of the prophets condemned those shepherds “who feed only themselves.” And we won’t have reformation in the historic evangelical world until the trained cooks stop stuffing all the food into their own pie holes, and show some kind of willingness to feed and nurture the ignorant. But we are stiff-necked, and refuse to waste any food on him. Why? He’s too skinny.