Important Note: Please also read the other articles in this section - The Broadness of Salvation and The Great ‘Good Works’ Misunderstanding – which relate to the question.

Barbara Kingsolver’s powerful novel The Poisonwood Bible tells of a highly dysfunctional fundamentalist Baptist missionary who takes his wife and three girls to the Belgian Congo in 1959. Much of the story is recounted in turn through the eyes of the wife and each of the three girls. In one such account the youngest child, Adah, ponders on the frequent deaths of the malnourished and often diseased children of the jungle village in which they are living. She describes her father’s reactions to these deaths as follows: “He doesn’t seem to mind the corpses so much as the souls unsaved.” Her father, like her Sunday school teachers back in North Georgia, believes that children are denied entry into heaven merely because of the accident of being born in a place like the Congo rather than in the USA, where they could attend church regularly. Adah confesses that this is the main sticking point on what she calls “my own little lame march to salvation: admission to heaven is gained by the luck of the draw”. (1)

She tells how at the age of five she raised this point in her Sunday school class and asked the teacher, “Would Our Lord be such a hit-or-miss kind of Saviour as that? Would he really condemn some children to eternal suffering just for the accident of a heathen birth, and reward others for a privilege they did nothing to earn?” For daring to question such time honoured evangelical doctrine Adah was sent to kneel in the corner on uncooked rice for an hour to pray for her own soul. She describes the result of this forced hour on her five year old mind. “When I finally got up with sharp grains imbedded in my knees I found, to my surprise, that I no longer believed in God. …… From that day I stopped parroting the words of Oh, God! God’s love!” (2))

If there is ever a hugely embarrassing and potentially catastrophic hole in the dike of evangelical theology, it is this very question and the issues it raises.

Issues like the eternal destiny of those billions of people who, since the dawn of time, have lived and died either never having had the chance to hear about Christ or having heard such a flawed and distorted version only that any person of integrity would have rejected what they heard.

Of all the thorny questions that can be asked of an exclusivistic Christian it is this one which is most likely to draw out the most truly foolish, poorly thought through and downright stupid of answers. (I know I used to preach them!) Answers which either make God and his Christ out to be sadistic monsters or, in the event that an attempt is made to soften the doctrine (and it often is), end up having to totally contradict the otherwise iron-clad logic of the exclusivist’s own core doctrines of salvation theology!

This most disturbing question has troubled the minds and consciences of thinking Christians for two thousand years. The issues it raises strike like a lance at the very heart of some of evangelical Christianity’s most fundamental doctrinal assumptions about who can and cannot live in right relationship with God.

It is my conviction that when this question is correctly explored it exposes the sheer foolishness and impossibility of certain key aspects of evangelical salvation understandings - doctrinal understandings which, if true, cast the most dreadful aspersions on the very character and goodness of God.