the problem with knowing the gospel

I’m tired. I just spent the last 40 minutes thinking about and answering a question on a discussion board. Because I’m lazy and efficient it will also serve as my blog post. I’m responding to the question, “what happens when two people have the same experience but different reactions?” I’ve given the context a specific form that applies to the discussion at large…the propositional nature of the gospel.

XXXX,

You had to ask that question. Why couldn't you just let this discussion be easy like Christianity is?

Well I'll take a stab, but my caveat is that it is precisely that...a stab (in the dark no less as I think the saying goes).

I would start here. Why do they have different reactions? Well, following the work of one of my all time favorite theologians, Greg Boyd, I submit that people fundamentally think in concrete pictures. So when two people experience something they immediately let a number of passed experiences both consciously and unconsciously inform the connotations that they develop in relation to the experience.

Let's say, for the sake of argument that the event the two people witnessed was God and undisputedly so. One person fixes the connotation correctly on one person of the trinity and thus gets their epistemology correct in this case. Now lets say the other person has this same experience, but fixes the connotations developed from the experience on Buddha. We (as the majority of evangelicals) would say they have messed up the epistemological portion of the experience.

Now in what follows I'm going to do something rare for a discussion like this in a semi-public forum and give my real opinion.

C.S. Lewis, at the end of The Last Battle, has this amazing encounter between Aslan and Emeth the Tarkan, Tarkan being our Buddhist in this case. The scene takes place in what we might call judgment day or end of time. Emeth, comes before Aslan with the assumed epistemology of the Narnian-Evangelicals concerning soteriology. Thus, he is quite sure that he will be disqualified and thus ineligible for salvation. But here, we are surprised by Aslan, who tells Emeth that he received all Emeth's worship, even though it was directed at Tash. Why? Because Aslan receives all true worship. Now some might object here, but might I quote Hebrews 4:12, "The word of God is living and active dividing joints and marrow, soul and spirit, and thoughts from intentions of the heart." I looked up word here and it is logos, so I'm going to go ahead and say we can talk about logos as God himself. God then, divides thoughts from intentions of the heart as Lewis implies in the above passage.

What Lewis does here is important. Not only does he point out that in this case ontology (who Emeth was and what he was really trying to do) was more important than epistemology (the propositional nature of Emeth's expression of worship), but he also forces us to think about just how difficult it is to draw the lines of salvation.

For example. It's one thing to say that ”the Hindu in the 4th century will be saved because of God's big grace and the Hindu never had the chance to accept the propositional form of the gospel.” But how about a more complicated example? What about the teenage female who grew up in America and happened to have the technical propositions of the gospel presented to her by a televangelist on TV, only to have him request her money two minutes later. She's probably turned off. To complicate the matter she is not only turned off because of the fact that he was a televangelist, but in the process of explaining the gospel he also mentioned the part about how the loving father sent his only son to die for us. Well did I mention that this girl is 17 living on the street because her father and brother sexually abused her for the last five years? Thus the idea of God the father and son nauseates her. She hates this God. He must be like the only concrete expression of father she knew. Ergo, she rejects God. She had the knowledge though. She should have just accepted it. Right? Unfortunately, she never did. She committed suicide out of depression and self-hatred.

It's a miracle my friends, a miracle. I'm not trying to make constitutive inclusivists out of all of us only to, in the spirit of Tony Jones, elicit complex answers to complex questions.

Thanks for the thought provoking question XXXX. What do ya'll think?

Carney