I have been writing about The Four Last Things, the traditional subjects of the four Sundays in Advent – Death, Judgment, Heaven and Hell. The fourth of the four last things is the doctrine of Hell. This is a subject that is rarely heard of in the pulpit these days. Yet there is no doubt that Jesus spoke of it often. While we may consider it acceptable for those people who are truly evil and who plainly and deliberately reject all the goodness of God the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, who will not accept the need for forgiveness on the day of Judgment, what about those who have never heard of Christ and the Gospel? John Stott laid out his answer to this perplexing question in terms of what he understood the New Testament to say.

First, all human beings, apart from the intervention and mercy of God, are perishing. We are all hell-deserving sinners. Without Christ I am ‘perishing’ and deserve to perish. He directed our attention to pages 89-110 of The Cross of Christ where he wrote about the gravity of sin and the majesty of God. He wanted to say to his contemporaries what Anselm said to his, “You have not yet considered the seriousness of sin.” The weakness of the liberal is to praise the good they see in others and to ignore their vanity, obstinacy selfishness, envy, impatience, malice and lack of self-control.

Secondly, human beings cannot save themselves by any religious or righteous acts. We all need the Savior for we all fall short of the glory of God.

Thirdly, Jesus Christ is the only Savior (John 14:6; Acts 4:12).

Fourthly, what condition has to be fulfilled in order that they may be saved? How much knowledge of Jesus do people have to have before they can believe in him? And how much faith do they have to exercise? What about those who have not heard it? They cannot save themselves, and Christ is the only Savior. Is there any way in which God will have mercy on them, through Christ alone, and not through their own merit? He lists a variety of speculative answers to these questions.

1. John Paul II in his encyclical Redemptor Hominis (1979) wrote: “Man – every man without any exception whatever – has been redeemed by Christ, and …..with man – with each man without any exception whatever – Christ is in a way united, even when man is unaware of it”. That kind of unconditional universalism, must, however, be firmly rejected by those who look to Scripture for authoritative guidance.
2. The sheep and goats passage in Matthew 25. This is not to be interpreted as salvation by works. The ‘brothers’ are his disciples. Their attitude to Jesus’ brothers will be made known by whether they welcome or reject them.
3. God knows how people would have responded if they had heard the gospel and will save them or judge them accordingly.
4. God gives everyone a vision of Jesus and therefore an opportunity to repent and believe at the moment of their dying. There is no evidence to support this.
5. God will give everybody an opportunity in the next life to respond to Jesus. This remains a guess and lacks biblical warrant.
6. Norman Anderson has suggested that some people who have never heard of Christ may be brought by their sense of sin to cry to God for mercy and find it on the basis of Christ’s atoning work. He cites the Old Testament believers who were saved by grace through faith, even though they knew little if anything about the coming Christ.

Speaking now for myself, although I am attracted by Norman Anderson’s concept, and although there may be truth in it I believe the most Christian stance is to remain agnostic on this question. When somebody asked Jesus, “Lord, are only a few people going to be saved?” (Luke 13:23) he refused to answer directly but exhorted the questioners to look to their own salvation.…The fact is that God, alongside the most solemn warnings about our responsibility to respond to the gospel, has not revealed how he will deal with those who have never heard it…..I cherish the hope that the majority of the human race will be saved….the final vision of the redeemed in the book of Revelation is of ‘a great multitude that no one could count’ (Rev. 7:9). As innumerable as the stars in the sky, the dust of the earth and the grains of sand on the seashores of the world. That is the hope I cherish, and that is the vision that inspires me, even while I remain agnostic about how God will bring it to pass.

(Ted Schroder, John Stott, A Summary of his Teaching, 137-138)