Love Wins 8.2

In our last post on Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived, we addressed chapter 6 titled “There are Rocks Everywhere”. In that chapter Rob argues that the idea of “mystery” that Paul speaks about is the idea that God is working in the world through Christ to bring everyone into unity. And because of this, he affirms that Christianity is an expression of that mysterious work of God in creation. This allows him to further affirm the possibility of salvation in and through other religions.

I suppose there are reasons for believing what Terry Tiessen labels “Religious Instrumentalism”, but I don’t think you can ground such a belief as Rob does on Paul’s term “mystery”.

Given our evidence in Acts and the Pauline letters, Paul would have never thought that someone could come to a saving faith without a full submission to the Lord Jesus Messiah.

For Paul, one cannot be an inadvertent citizen of the kingdom of God and his Messiah. How easily we forget that early believers were convinced that God’s Kingdom was in some way present and soon-to-come;  God’s kingdom is Messiah’s kingdom. And Messiah’s kingdom is Israel’s kingdom. In the New Testament, topics like being saved and heaven and hell were not primarily about an existential experience of being at peace and harmony with oneself and the world or even about “going to heaven” when you die.

Paul traveled around the Aegean Sea and through the Roman Empire not to get people into heaven, but to announce that the Jewish Messiah who is not just the king of Israel, bu also the king of the world is coming to judge (Acts 17). He relentlessly proclaimed the Gospel to Gentiles precisely because they needed to repent and submit to the Lordship of the Israelite Messiah who was a specific person, “this Jesus” (Acts 17:3). Paul believed that all people everywhere needed to hear the good news of God’s renewal of the world and the coming of His kingdom. It was a message whose central claim was that this work was being done in and through the man Jesus.

According to Paul at least, you won’t be saved, experience heaven and avoid hell without a personal, conscious and willing decision to believe in Jesus.