Being Born At The Wrong Time

A central conviction of evangelical Christians is that an experience of Jesus Christ as one's personal Savior and Lord, definable both in content and time of occurrence, is essential for salvation. A major assumption behind the conviction is that in the experience, the saved know who their experience is of, because they have already heard about, and therefore know, who Jesus Christ is. I have less of a problem with the conviction than I do with the assumption.

Although evangelicals tip their helmets of salvation conspicuously when they lay on the importance of encountering Jesus personally, their idea itself actually has merit. Salvation is not merely something conferred from a cross a long time ago on the basis of a transaction involving only Jesus and his Father. Unless in some way one experiences the work of the cross through the changes it makes possible in one's own life, there is little worth celebrating about it. As Isaac Watts once put it, we need to see for ourselves the mingled sorrow and love flowing down.

About the evangelical conviction, then: so far so good. But now what has to be faced is the evangelical assumption, and on this terrain the going is not as easy. The assumption is that salvation is for those who know Jesus. Not just his background, or his teachings, or his followers, with their own teachings and doctrines. And not just good people in all times and places who have struggled to lead good lives to the best of their own knowledge of things. Only Jesus, and knowledgeable experience of him, finally counts.

One difficulty with this assumption is that it makes salvation impossible for people who were born after Jesus died, but who failed and fail to get the word about their divinely imposed obligations to him. Many evangelicals overcome this difficulty by insisting that the "word" was out there for the hearing and the taking, and therefore that people who did not avail themselves of it are without excuse. Perhaps.

But surely this reasoning cannot apply to that other segment of humanity whose members were born before the coming of Christ. These folks comprise quite a multitude, whether they range back only six thousand years or so, per Archbishop Ussher and not a whole lot of remaining followers, or seven million years or so, per Jared Diamond and more followers than we can count. The problem for people born too early is not that they failed to pay attention to what they should readily have known, in some form, about what the later-arriving Jesus would stand for. Rather, it is that they hadn't been born when anybody else knew anything about it either. Denying them salvation on the grounds of untimely birth is something no God I know anything about would even consider doing.

To this problem, evangelical Christians offer three basic solutions. The first is an humble acknowledgement of the problem as a problem, accompanied by a winsome expression of trust that, somehow, God will make things right with the people who happened to have been born at the wrong time. This version of evangelical Christianity is a keeper.

Two other versions are not. One espouses a kind of Malthusian spirituality that seems to relish the efforts of the Powers-That-Be to keep the population behind the pearly gates down. "No chance to hear about Jesus? Well, life is tough all over, but that's just the way it is. What do you expect any of the rest of us to do about it anyway?" From this perspective, the Father's house must have more empty rooms than anybody ought to feel comfortable with.

Another, equally frightening response to the issue of being born too soon to be saved typically gets expressed not in words but in a blank stare. The look on the faces of some evangelical Christians when I raise this issue with them makes plain that it simply has not occurred to them, ghettoized as they are in cults of their own making, that the reconciling ministry in God's name had to be going on in some form in all the worlds that preceded Jesus Christ on earth, precisely because all of those worlds represent just as much God's world as Jesus' world and our own do.

A transforming experience of Jesus Christ as your personal Savior and Lord? Go for it. On the far side of your salvation, however, particularly in the Kingdom that is not of this world, there may be more than just a few surprises awaiting you, when you discover who is, and is not, there already.