There are
many people who ask themselves: “OK, we Christians have our faith -the true
faith; we have our Church, we have our Lord’s Revelation, we are already
inside the channel leading to salvation, towards the Kingdom of Heaven –
PROVIDED of course that we are appropriately careful during our lifetime.
But what about all those people who
belong to other faiths? What happens to Buddhists?
What happens to Muslims? (Not to mention the other, Christian Confessions). But,
let’s tackle the other religions for now: don’t those people go to Heaven? What
kind of judgment does God have in store for them? Are we the only ones that will
be judged and accordingly be either “promoted” –so to speak- or ……”left out”?
What happens to the others? Is
there no salvation for them?
The answer
is: of course salvation can exist for them.
The status of this matter is as follows: Someone who
has become acquainted with Christianity and has been
baptized will be judged on the law of the Gospel, the
Law of Grace. But someone living –for example- in
Madagascar, Sumatra or Borneo, South America, the North
Pole, wherever the Gospel has not been preached,
will be judged according to the clarification cited by
the Apostle Paul in his Epistle to Romans; that is, he
will be judged on the basis of the law of his
conscience: “..when the gentiles (=all those who
do not have a written, moral code) instinctively
uphold the stipulations of the law, to them –albeit
having no written law- the law shall be their own self.
They prove that they have the enforcement of the law
written in their hearts”. (Romans 2: 14-15)
God has
placed inside every single person, without exception,
wherever they may be found on this earth, that unbiased
tribunal – the inherent ethical law – based on which
they will be judged. If they lived faithful to that
innate moral code, they shall enter Paradise; if they
don’t, they will not qualify to enter.
Of course there will
be – according to the words in Corinthians I, 15:41 “a
star differs to another star, in its glory” – a
gradation in Paradise, just as there will be in Hell.
People of other faiths will, because of their good
deeds during their lifetime, enter Paradise, but they
will not enjoy the same pleasures that, say, Apostle
Paul or Saint Makarios will enjoy there.
Some may
think: “Isn’t that being “unfair” to those people? No,
it isn’t, because they will also be judged more
leniently. Christianity is very strict, with the
rules that it contains. To briefly deviate from the
subject, we could underline that evidence of
Christianity’s truth is also the multitude of its
faithful. When seeking to attract followers, one doesn’t
project negative aspects. On the contrary, the
prospective followers are promised all sorts of benefits
and conveniences; they are flattered and they are
pampered. In the case of Christianity, however, Christ
had stresses to His disciples that “You shall suffer
tribulations in the world” (John 16: 33) and “If
they persecuted me, they shall also persecute you”
(John 15: 20); and many more such ‘promises’, which are
totally deterrent if used to attract followers. But,
when Christianity ‘promises’ such harsh conditions, and
yet it attracts people to it, it only proves that
Christianity is the truth.
Getting back to our
subject, on the matter of other, non-Christian
believers. A Christian is not as ‘lucky’ a follower,
given that Christ demands much more from Christians!
They will go to an even more INFERIOR place than the
non-Christians, if they do not enforce those things that
Christ requires of them. The non-Christians will NOT be
judged in accordance with the Gospel, but more
leniently.
See the
difference here: A man who will be judged according to
the innate moral law, will be held accountable to God,
only for –let’s say-the actual act of
adultery that he had committed. But a Christian will be
judged much more severely: even for his one, single,
lustful glance, for example. He will be judged “in his
words, in his acts and in his thoughts”. The benefits
may be more for a Christian, but the criteria will be
more austere and his path will be far more difficult to
walk. Everything is fair. God is meticulously just.
As father Paisios of the Holy Mountain had said, “God
doesn’t have even two identical scales; He weighs every
single person on separate, personal scales”. Depending
on where the person is born, what kind of environment he
was brought up in, the kinds of parents, the school, the
country, the religion, the peculiarities of every single
person. God makes no mistakes.
The late Christos
Androutsos, professor of Dogmatics, used to say that
Orthodoxy is the only sure path for salvation. It is not
the only path for salvation, but
it is the only safe road.
Fr.Joel
Yannakopoulos gives us a visual example, in
order to comprehend the words of Androutsos. He says:
During the war, there was a safe path that joined the
town of Kalamata to Athens: it was the one used by the
armored convoy. Of course there were other paths, which
were used by people moving between the two cities, but
they weren’t safe paths. This is exactly how things are
with the Orthodox Church and the heterodox and other
non-Christians.
We have to stress
however, that if someone is baptized an Orthodox and
then becomes a heretic, or, even worse, an infidel, that
person will never be saved by remaining in that new
faith, no matter how many good deeds he may perform.
There is a distinct difference between being a Buddhist
or a Muslim and not knowing Christ, and a totally
different thing to deny Christ for the sake of
Buddha or Shiva or Allah.
So much for the
salvation of others. What is of chief concern is OUR
OWN salvation. The question “What about him?”
that Peter asked, regarding John the Evangelist (John
21:21) - in other words, “What will become of him?” -
was a “show of compassion”; it was an external display
of his caring for John. We, however, take This
expression and use it simply informatively and
gnosiologically, i.e.: “What will become with the
heterodox or the non-Christians?”, without concerning
ourselves with our own salvation! Therefore, the proper
thing to do is to attend to the salvation of our own
soul, and at the same time show an interest in the
salvation of other people who have entered the Orthodox
Church (of their own free will), and not merely wonder
in our minds what will become of them.
Source: fr.
John Kostov: “Faith and Logic”
A publication by Manolis Melinos, Athens 2002, pages 19-23 (adaptation).
