Can Non-Christians Receive Grace?

The question is itself a very complex one, but in order to answer it we must first answer the question of whether or not we even need to be saved or if we can escape damnation by simply being "good enough" and after we have taken a stance on whether or not non-Christians can be saved we must then answer the question of how anyone is saved, particularly those who are not Christians.

For the first question (do we need to be saved in order to escape damnation?) the answer is yes. Firstly, many who object to this have a misconceived notion of Christians believing that God sends people to Hell; in other words, they think of the situation as being such that God imposes damnation on those who refuse to follow Him. This is fundamentally mistaken as it fails to account for the true nature of both Heaven and Hell as well as the human condition. Heaven is a place that is defined by the presence of God, who is the very essence of goodness, and Hell is defined by His absence. At the same time, we as humans have two natures: one which is divine and one which is fallen. The problem of all this is that evil is not, as many envision it, a self-existent force opposite to good but rather a corruption of good. Everything we call evil is really a twisted version of something that is good. What this means is that while goodness is decided by an ultimate, unbending standard, sin is simply anything that falls short of that standard. In other words, regardless of how strong our divine nature might me, as long as we also have a fallen nature we are damned.

Another reason for our need for salvation is our pride. Pride has been identified as many theologians as the source of all sin and it can be described in two ways: first, it is a desire to be God and second, it is a flaw in our ability to percieve value. The first description is important mainly in its ability to inform us of the results of pride in both the actions that stem from it and the consequences of it. If we desire to be God then we will hoard all the glory we can for ourselves, we will disregard the absolute laws of morality (often through an attempted compromise we call "decency"), and we will be infuriated at those around us who come into conflict with our desires. At the same time, it is clear that we who have the sin of pride could never share in the glory of God, not simply because He would find us sinful but also because we would find His acts of mercy infuriating. Reflecting on the second description, we get an image of humility. If pride is an imbalance in our sense of our own value as well as the value of others we may dislike or do not know, then humility must be a total impartiality. To be truly humble must be to love everyone and everything just as God loves them, including oneself. On the other hand, there can be no sly self-congratulation, no claims to glory that really belong to God, not one ounce of love for yourself for being your own self rather than the self that God created. Truly this humility would be filled with a new and unimaginably rich self-love but at the same time it would require the sacrifice of that sinister self-love of which we are so fond. Can you even begin to honestly desire such a state? So attached are we to our fallen nature that we cannot possibly approach this wondrous dream without a hint of fear. How can we expect to enter paradise on our own when we can't even fully desire it on our own?

Moving on to the second question, can non-Christians be saved? I believe the answer is yes. There are a couple of verses that support this view, namely Romans 4:13, which sets the precedent that one can be saved by Christ without an explicit knowledge of Him, and Matthew 25:34-40 (the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats) which indicates how non-Christians could be saved (why would Christians be confused by this scenario anyway?). However, these verses do not provide much positive backing and for me they really just say that there is room in a biblical worldview for this belief. I stand with C.S. Lewis here who said that "We do know that no person can be saved except through Christ; we do not know that only those who know Him can be saved by Him." When it comes down to it, this belief is really based on my conviction that God would not create people who are destined for Hell not because they reject Christ but instead because they lack the opportunity to accept Him.

Next is the question of how we are saved. Clearly there is the Crucifixion (although I did make a point of addressing the issue of damnation, I am generally assuming a biblical worldview in this essay; arriving at that worldview would take an entire other paper) but to settle with that answer is to describe the process of eating when one is really asking for the full story of how the nutrients get distributed to the entire body. One particular quote from C.S. Lewis may shed light on this issue:

"But supposing God became a man-- suppose our human nature which can suffer and die was amalgamated with God's nature in one person-- then that person could help us. He could surrender His will, and suffer and die, because He was man; He could do it perfectly because He was God. You and I can go through this process only if God does it in us; but God can only do it if He becomes man. Our attempts at this dying will succeed only if we men share in God's dying, just as our thinking can succeed only when it is a drop out of the ocean of His intelligence: but we cannot share in God's dying unless God dies; and He cannot die except by being a man."

To enter Heaven, we must let go of our fallen nature, must die to it. However, all that we are comes from God (even sin is just a perversion of what He had provided us) and the one thing that God does not do is die. As a result, we can only die in the way of the fallen world and therefore can only die not to our sin but to the general grace God has extended over this world. The solution, as described by Lewis, was for God to become a man and die.

The salvation suggested by this comes when one dies to the fallen world. This death can be in the form of an acceptance of the truly divine and otherworldly doctrine of Christianity or it could perhaps also take the form of an act of selfless love. I do not claim to know what specifically constitutes this heavenly death without the doctrine and it could be that the vague description I have just given is off the mark. Remember both that this is not the least bit central to any interpretation of Scripture and that we are each accountable only for our own soul and have no authority to judge the salvation or damnation of others.

I should also address two point of possible contention with Christians who feel what I am saying is unbiblical. First, I am not advocating salvation by good works. This salvation for the heathen is dependent on his or her own actions only in the same sense that a Christian's salvation is dependent on the actions of repentence and acceptance of Messiah's sacrifice. Secondly, this view does not exclude the doctrine that Messiah took upon Himself our sins and took them to the grave with Him. In fact, it requires it. In order for Messiah to die in a Godly way He would have had to have died for a purpose beyond the simple purpose of dying. In other words, He could not have died simply to have had the experience of dying and as a consequence must have had a second purpose.

These two purposes of the Crucifixion fit together perfectly in light of the two functions of grace. Grace is forgiveness to be sure but it goes beyond that. The grace of God does not just wipe away our sins, it renews our souls.It is through grace that we are made more and more into the likeness of Messiah. It is through grace that we are able to take up our daily cross and die to the world again and again.