In reading another blog about converstion between athiesm and catholicism (http://www.conversiondiary.com/) and learned this little tidbit from the Catechism of the Catholic Church:
"Those who, through no fault of their own, do not know the Gospel of Christ or his Church, but who nevertheless seek God with a sincere heart, and, moved by grace, try in their actions to do his will as they know it through the dictates of their conscience - those too may achieve eternal salvation."
Basically, it is the opinion of the catholic church that if you have never heard about Jesus or even God, it's not your fault and you can still go to heaven. If you are a sincere and good person, that's good enough for God. Initially, I was relieved to read something like that. The idea that God could send someone to eternal punishment for something they were completely ignorant of had always struck me as globally unfair, but this bit of theology raises an interesting question: why evangelize? If everyone who is ignorant of God and a relatively good person will go to heaven, why risk telling them the truth? Then they might decide they don't agree with what you've said, but since they now have information, they will be held responsible for it. Why not just let everyone die in their ignorance and end up in heaven? The only argument I can think of is that those in ignorance will miss out on knowing God in this lifetime and doing his work, but that doesn't seem to be much of a problem in light of eternity. If a person can just make it into heaven, they have millions of years to foster a relationship with God, do his work and most likely have relationships with others around them. If its true that "You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes." (James 4:14b), then just a few years of knowing God on earth hardly seem worth the risk.
No comments:
Post a Comment