Justified True Belief

(P1) It does not follow from God's love and power that every person would hear the gospel. + Almost everyone who asks this has a face in mind: a grandmother in a village in 800 BC, a child in the Amazon, a man who died long before any missionary could reach him. The objection is that a loving, all-powerful God would have seen to it that everyone heard. (1) The charge is contradiction, and it rests on two planks. - The complaint is not that Christianity is unlikely but that it denies itself, and a contradiction is strict: one claim ruling out another, as an open door rules out a shut one. - Getting from "God is loving" to "everyone would have heard" takes two planks: that God could have made a world where all hear and freely say yes, and that love would have chosen it. - Neither plank has been laid down, and neither has to be certain, since a link in a chain of reasoning need only be more believable than its denial. (2) If the yes has to be genuinely yours, God cannot supply it for you. - Everything turns on "freely," and two rival accounts of human freedom have been argued over for centuries. An objector has to get past both. - On the first, a free choice is one the person could have gone either way on, with nothing outside him settling it. Philosophers call that libertarian freedom, and the name has nothing to do with politics. - A world is possible if history could have run that way without contradiction, and feasible if God could actually bring it about, given what free people would do. - A host can picture an evening where every guest arrives in good spirits, but whether he can deliver it is up to the guests. Universal free acceptance may be that kind of world. (3) On the other account of freedom, God could have brought everyone in. - The rival account says freedom is doing what you actually want without anyone forcing you, which leaves room for God to settle how things come out. It is called compatibilism. - A man who stays in the job he loves is acting freely on that view, even though his wife could have predicted it a year ago. - Christians who hold it grant that God could have brought everyone to faith, and answer elsewhere: mercy is owed to nobody, so giving it to some wrongs nobody who goes without. - Paul raises the objector's own question and refuses the premise under it: "Is there injustice on God’s part? By no means" (Romans 9:14). He gives a purpose, God's power in judgment and the riches of his glory in mercy (Romans 9:22-23), and leaves undisclosed why these and not those. - Other Christians read Paul differently and say so at length. None of them say the objection has landed. (4) The second plank assumes love would prefer that world to every other. - Grant the first plank: love still has to choose that world, and that does not follow either. - Set two worlds side by side. In one, two billion freely come to God; in the other, five billion do, and it is the world with the uneven spread history shows. - The numbers are invented, and that is the point. Nobody knows how the whole range of possible histories sorts out, the Christian included. (5) A hard question is not the same as a contradiction. - Inconsistency means there is no possible way for all the claims to be true together. Difficulty is not enough. - A detective in a locked room with a body and no idea how the killer got out has not proved nobody did. He has proved something about the detective. - The burden therefore sits with the objector, and it follows from what the objection claimed: not "this is troubling" but "this cannot be." - Settling free will, providence, and which worlds were God's to make is not impossible in principle. None of it has been done. Therefore, God's love and power do not by themselves give us a world where every person hears.

(P2) God judges each person according to the light that person actually received. + Picture an examination where the paper goes round to some of the class and not to others, and everyone who never got one is marked down as failed. If that were the teaching it would deserve every word of the complaint, but the texts describe something else. (1) Judgment is scaled to what a person was given. - Jesus puts the principle in a story about servants waiting up for their master. "That servant who knew his master's will but did not get ready or act according to his will, will receive a severe beating. But the one who did not know, and did what deserved a beating, will receive a light beating." - Then the rule: "Everyone to whom much was given, of him much will be required" (Luke 12:47-48). Amos puts it to Israel as a warning, not a compliment: "You only have I known of all the families of the earth; therefore I will punish you for all your iniquities" (Amos 3:2). - Paul applies it to the line the objection cares about, between those who had God's written law and those who never received it. "All who have sinned without the law will also perish without the law, and all who have sinned under the law will be judged by the law" (Romans 2:12). - Each person is measured by the standard he was under, which is not to say that those outside the law come off well. (2) The scale runs the opposite way from the one the objection assumes. - Chorazin and Bethsaida saw Jesus' works and Tyre and Sidon never did, yet "it will be more bearable on the day of judgment for Tyre and Sidon than for you" (Matthew 11:21-22). - More light means more accountability, not less. The man who never heard is not at the bottom of that scale. The man who heard it all and shrugged is. (3) Ignorance reduces guilt rather than creating it. - Jesus tells leaders who claimed to see clearly, "If you were blind, you would have no guilt; but now that you say, We see, your guilt remains" (John 9:41). - Peter tells a crowd who had just had Jesus killed, "I know that you acted in ignorance" (Acts 3:17), opening an appeal rather than closing a case. - Paul, who had spent years hunting Christians down, writes, "I received mercy because I had acted ignorantly in unbelief" (1 Timothy 1:13). In Athens: "The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent" (Acts 17:30). - Four passages, four situations, all moving the same direction. (4) The message is the remedy, not the charge. - Nobody catches an illness by failing to read about the treatment. - The human problem is in place long before any missionary reaches the village: a real moral debt, owed by everybody, the missionary included. - The gospel is not the bill arriving. It is the announcement that the bill has been paid, and a man who never hears it is in the condition it was sent to fix. (5) The honest version of this is harder than the objection, not easier. - Measured by whatever light they had, Paul's verdict is that nobody clears the bar, and he argues it at length (Romans 3:9-20). - The scale is not a quiet way of saying most people are probably fine. It says nobody is measured against a standard he was never under, not that anybody passes. - If that strikes you as harsh, you have understood it. What comes off the table is condemnation for an accident of geography, and what replaces it carries its own offense. (6) The real question survives, in better shape. - Is it fair that the rescue is announced to some and not to others? That is the better question, and (P3) and (P4) take it up. Therefore, nobody is judged by a standard he was never under.

(C1) Therefore, Christian teaching condemns no one for an accident of birth. + (1) The complaint describes a system the texts do not teach. - It pictures a God who marks people down for information he never sent. - The texts describe a scale keyed to what each person actually received, and on that scale not knowing counts in a person's favor rather than against him (P2). (2) The step to a world where everyone hears was never taken. - The claim that a loving, all-powerful God must have arranged for everyone to hear rests on two planks, one about which worlds were his to make and one about what love would have chosen. - Nobody has laid either of them down (P1). (3) Both halves run on the plainest form of reasoning there is. - If the bridge is out, the road is closed; the bridge is out; so the road is closed. Logicians call that modus ponens. Everybody uses it and almost nobody names it. - Run it on the first half: a charge of contradiction is not made out while the assumptions it needs go unestablished, and these have gone unestablished. - Run it on the second: if judgment is scaled to what a person received, nobody is condemned for what he never received, and it is scaled that way. - Each link had to be more believable than its denial, and no more than that. (4) What this settles is narrow, and the narrowness matters. - It takes away the charge that the Christian God runs an arbitrary lottery keyed to birthplace, which is the charge the objection actually makes. - It does not tell anybody the fate of any particular person. Therefore, from (P1) and (P2) together, no one stands condemned for an accident of birth.

(P3) God has disclosed himself to every person through creation and conscience. + Take a man herding goats in the Zagros mountains in 1500 BC, with no Bible, no synagogue and no missionary within two thousand miles. On the objection's picture he has nothing at all. (1) Two kinds of revelation, and only one of them is missing. - General revelation is what God shows everyone everywhere: the world itself, and the moral sense inside a person. Special revelation is the particular message given through Israel, the prophets, Christ and Scripture. - The objection assumes that people outside the reach of the second have nothing. They have the first, and the first is not nothing. - The goat herder has the world in front of him, and whatever it is inside him that tells him, untaught, that hurting a child for entertainment is wrong. (2) The world itself is treated as testimony. - Israel sang about it: "The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork" (Psalm 19:1). - Paul turns the same thought into an argument. "What can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made" (Romans 1:19-20). - Two verbs carry that sentence: shown, and perceived. Neither describes a faint hint for the philosophically gifted. - To farmers in Lystra he reaches for nothing grander: God "did not leave himself without witness, for he did good by giving you rains from heaven and fruitful seasons" (Acts 14:17). Rain and harvest, offered as evidence, to farmers. (3) The conscience is treated the same way. - "When Gentiles, who do not have the law, by nature do what the law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they do not have the law. They show that the work of the law is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness" (Romans 2:14-15). - Scholars argue over parts of that passage, but not the claim in the middle of it: real moral knowledge reaches people who never received a written commandment. - Everyone knows that cruelty for its own sake is wrong. Nobody had to be told it across a desk. (4) The arrangement of history is itself aimed at seeking. - "He made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, that they should seek God, and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him. Yet he is actually not far from each one of us" (Acts 17:26-27). - Where and when a person is born is no accident, and the purpose given for it is seeking. (5) In the record, God goes a long way for a seeker. - A Roman officer named Cornelius prays in Caesarea to a God whose name he does not know, and Peter is moved across a region to reach him, dragged over his own convictions about who may be spoken to (Acts 10). - An Ethiopian official reads Isaiah on a desert road, and somebody is sent to meet him there (Acts 8:26-35). - Two stories are not a law of nature. They are the pattern the New Testament keeps showing: when somebody is reaching, the reaching is met. (6) General revelation is not said to save, and that limit is real. - Paul's conclusion about it is that it leaves people "without excuse" (Romans 1:20), not that it saves anybody. - Whether a person can respond savingly to creation and conscience alone is where Christians divide, and smoothing that over would be cheating. - The claim in (P3) is smaller and still does the work: nobody stands in total darkness, so nobody is judged on nothing. Therefore, God has given every person real light, whatever remains in dispute about what that light can do.

(P4) Christians give several coherent accounts of how Christ's work reaches those who never hear of him. + Tell somebody it is impossible to be in Chicago on Monday and Denver on Tuesday, and one airline timetable ends it. He never has to show that anyone made the trip, only that the trip is there to be made. (1) One coherent account defeats a charge of contradiction. - The charge is that Christianity's account of the unevangelized, people who never had the message put in front of them, cannot be squared with its claim that God is just. - A single coherent way for both to hold defeats it, and that way has to be possible rather than true, as with the logical problem of evil. - There are four such ways, all held by Christians who confess the historic creeds. (2) The unevangelized may respond to the light they have. - Christ's work may reach a man who responds to what he was given, as it reached Abraham, who never heard the name. This is inclusivism. - Its text is Peter's, on meeting a Gentile household: "Truly I understand that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him" (Acts 10:34-35). - Its cost is in the same story. An angel tells that officer to send for Peter, who will speak "a message by which you will be saved" (Acts 11:14). He was not left where he was. (3) God may have arranged the times and places so that nobody misses out. - This is a proposal about how history was arranged, not a rival account of who gets saved, and it travels with the strictest of the four. - On it God knows what people would freely do in any circumstance he might place them in. That is middle knowledge, sitting between what could happen and what will. - So he could place anyone who would have said yes where the message reaches him (Acts 17:26-27). Jesus talks this way himself: Tyre and Sidon "would have repented long ago" had they seen what Chorazin saw (Matthew 11:21). - The cost is real: it needs accounts of freedom and divine knowledge that many Christians reject, and philosophers dispute whether anything could make a claim about what a free person would have done true. It is offered as a possibility, never as knowledge. (4) Explicit faith may be required, with the unevangelized lost. - This is called restrictivism, and it rests on Paul's chain: calling requires believing, believing requires hearing, hearing requires a preacher (Romans 10:14-17). - It is the position the objection finds hardest, and its defenders do not flinch. Nobody is treated unjustly, they answer, because nobody is innocent, and this is why the church was sent out. (5) The encounter may come at or after death. - This is the postmortem view, and postmortem here means only "after death." It is the smallest of the four and the most contested. - Its critics point to "it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment" (Hebrews 9:27) and take the door to be closed. (6) The four do not stand or fall together. - They rest on different texts and different philosophical commitments, so knocking one down leaves the rest standing. - Sink middle knowledge and inclusivism is untouched. Argue against inclusivism from Romans 10 and middle knowledge survives, since it agrees explicit faith is needed. Nothing aimed at the mercy of the other three touches restrictivism, which never claimed it. - A charge of contradiction therefore has to rule out all four at once. Objections that damage one or two are common in the literature. None closes all four. - One argument would close all four, and it is not about the unevangelized at all: that no arrangement in which anybody is finally lost could be just. It is serious, and it belongs on the ground of judgment. (7) Whoever is saved is saved by Christ, on all four accounts. - That is what they share, and none of them claims knowledge of any individual's fate. - A fifth answer, that nobody finally refuses, has been hoped for by a minority since the early centuries. It dissolves the question rather than answering it, and nothing turns on ruling it in or out. Therefore, coherent accounts are available, and a charge of contradiction would have to close every one of them.

(C2) Therefore, the fate of those who never hear is consistent with the justice and love of God. + The objection set out to show a contradiction between a just and loving God and a world where billions never heard, and it has not shown one. (1) Every step the objection needs has failed. - It needs two assumptions, one about which worlds God could bring about and one about what love would choose, and neither has been established (P1). - It describes a system of judgment by information that the texts do not teach and repeatedly contradict (P2). - It assumes that people beyond the reach of the message have nothing, when the account hands them the world, their own conscience, and times and places arranged for seeking (P3). - And it would have to close off four answers that rest on different foundations and do not fall together (P4). (2) What Christianity commits to is less than people assume and more than nothing. - God judges justly, by what each person received, and nobody is left without light. - God is not indifferent to those who have not heard, since the arrangement of history is said to be aimed at their seeking. And whoever is saved is saved through Christ. - What it does not commit to is a mechanism, a number, or a verdict on any particular person. Nobody knows what happened to a man who died in the Andes in 1200 BC, and anybody who says otherwise has gone past the evidence. (3) A weaker complaint survives all of this, and it is the better one. - Not that the claims contradict, but that a world where the message arrived late and spread unevenly looks less like the world a God who wants everyone saved would run. That is an argument from evidence rather than from contradiction, and evidence gets weighed rather than refuted. - Judgment tracks what a person actually received (P2), and nobody stands in total darkness (P3), so the unreached are not people whose standing was fixed by a map. - The rest of the weighing takes in the whole case for and against God. What has been answered is the charge actually made, that the Christian position convicts itself. (4) The oldest answer of all is a question Abraham asked God to his face. - "Shall not the Judge of all the earth do what is just?" (Genesis 18:25). - That is not a refusal to answer. It is a claim about the character of the judge, offered by a tradition that also claims he came in person and took the worst of it himself. (5) All four answers come with the same assignment attached. - The man who wrote that faith comes by hearing was Paul, and he spent his life on roads and ships making sure people heard. What Christianity prescribes is not speculation about the unreached but going to them. - He did exactly that in Athens, in front of people who had never heard a word of it. He had passed an altar inscribed to an unknown god, and opened with it: "What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you" (Acts 17:23). - He did not tell them they were doomed for not knowing. He told them the times of ignorance had been overlooked, that God set their boundaries so they would reach for him, and that he was never far off. Therefore, nothing in the Christian account fixes a person's standing by his birthplace, and what it owes the unreached is what Paul gave that crowd, which was to tell them the name. See also: • CO / Miscellaneous: How Can Jesus Be the Only Way? • CO / Problem of Evil: Intellectual PoE: Logical • CO / Problem of Evil: Intellectual PoE: Probabilistic • Natural Theology: The Moral Argument