Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!christian From: palmer@amelia.nas.nasa.gov (Grant E. Palmer) Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian Subject: what does it take to be saved Message-ID: Date: 16 Jan 90 09:44:23 GMT Sender: hedrick@athos.rutgers.edu Lines: 80 Approved: christian@aramis.rutgers.edu A friend of mine who is a devout christia, a baptist I think, and I were having a discussion last night on what it takes to be saved. She said that the only requirement is that you ask for forgiveness for your sins and accept Jesus as your savior. There was no time limit on this, in other words you could do this 30 minutes before you died, and it didn't matter what your life had been like before. On the other hand, if you did not do those two things it didn't matter what you were like, you were damned. Is this true? Let me pose an extreme example. Say one person leads a totally corrupt and evil life spreading nothing but hurt and misery. 20 minutes before this person is sent to the electric chair for sexually abusing and murdering children, He or she sincerely asks for forgiveness and accepts Jesus as his savior. Therefore, he is saved. Another person leads a good and wholesome life helping others and spreading love and joy throughout the land. Yet this person never accepts Jesus as his or her savior. Therefore this person is damned to Hell. Is this scenario consistent with Christian beliefs? Is the only criterion for admission to heaven the acceptance of Jesus regardless of anything else you might do. And finally are the millions of muslims, buddhists, whatever who do not accept Jesus automatically damned to Hell making Heaven primarily populated by western souls? grant "no sig line" palmer [That's certainly the classic doctrine. As far as I know, all Christians would agree that a serious conversion is sufficient, no matter what you had done before, even right at the point of death. That view goes back quite directly to Jesus. A lot of his teaching, particularly his parables, calls people to repentance. Take a look for example at Mat 20, a parable that seems to deal with exactly this issue. Jesus deals with it in parables. I suspect many Protestants would tend to answer you in terms of Pauline theology, explaining that people are saved not because of any good works that they do, but by their faith in God. However at that point we are getting into more controversial territory. But as far as I know even those who are uncomfortable with "salvation by faith alone" would still agree that deathbed repentance is sufficient -- so long as it is real repentance, i.e. it would hold even if the person miraculously recovered. The only place you'd be likely to get an argument is on the issue of salvation of non-Christians. Christians generally believe that salvation came through Christ. That's the whole point of Christianity. If people could be good enough to merit salvation, Christ's death wouldn't have been needed in the first place. The problem is that even people who do good deeds are imperfect. No matter how many good things a person does, if you look carefully into their hearts, you'll find that their motives are at best mixed. I don't want to detract from the importance of doing the right thing. But when spiritually discerning people look at themselves carefully, they see how much of what they do is motivated by wanting to look good, etc. In the final judgement, even the best of us would still be condemned. So the only hope is that Christ has taken the condemnation in our place. This is all generic Christian doctrine, which in one form or another I think all types of Christians would agree with. Where things get murky is over what one has to do to take advantage of Christ's salvation. There are some Christians who believe that Christ died even for those who don't know him by name. A typical version of this is that God calls everyone in some form, and judges people based on how they respond to his call. In non-Christian societies his call may come in a non-Christian form. But ultimately people would have to be saved by Christ, even if they didn't realize it. (The Catholic term for such people is "anonymous Christians".) This concept is controversial, though. There are plenty of Christians, probably even a majority, who believe exactly what you said. Certainly the Bible tends to be rather "intolerant". In the OT, God is only interested in true worship. There is no sign of his accepting people who worship other gods as being anonymous forms of him. Similarly, Paul's letters talk a lot about "putting on Christ", etc., and it's rather hard for someone to do all of these things without accepting that Christ is their savior. --clh]