I once read a statement that stopped me in my tracks and made me think. It was this. "Some of the best Christians I ever met are atheists."

What the writer was saying was that as far as the Christian qualities of selfless service to human kind, compassion and integrity went, in his experience some of those who best modelled these qualities had been people who did not believe in the existence of God.

This immediately raises the key question….
In the case of a person who, for what ever reasons, cannot bring themselves to believe in the existence of God, yet lives a life that is truly in accord with those lofty ethical imperatives contained in the great command ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you’, does God’s grace cover their failure to believe correctly and therefore does he regard them as being in the Kingdom of God and candidates for heaven on death?

The normal evangelical response to this question

Perhaps the first instinctive response among some evangelicals would be to foolishly try to deny that such genuinely good atheists exist at all or to declare that, even if they do, there are so few of them as to make such a question all but irrelevant. (My response would be that even if there were only one such person on the entire planet then this question is still valid and needs to be asked.) What must be faced up to, however, is that it is quite clear such highly principled atheists do exist and in larger numbers than most evangelicals would admit to.

The second response would be to vigorously deny that God would or could ever regard an atheist as ‘in the Kingdom’. In support of this view evangelicals would appeal to at least two Bible verses. These are the often quoted statements in Psalm 14.1 and Hebrews 11.6.

We will examine each of these verses in turn.

Psalm 14.1: “The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God.’”
Evangelicals will claim that this verse clearly shows that God would never accept someone who doesn’t believe in him and whom David calls a fool.

However it is not at all clear that the person being described here is an atheist in the sense that we today would class such a person. In fact it is most unlikely that anyone of this period in history would totally reject the idea of the existence of all deities/gods. The foolishness described here is far more likely to be that of a prideful rejection of Elohim, the God of the Hebrews, as the only ‘high God’ and their consequent choice of another god as the object of ritual focus. In other words, this is far more likely to be just another way of condemning the worship of other gods.