Do people who have never heard of Jesus go to hell?

Here is another question somebody passed along to me recently:

Does Christianity teach that people who have never heard of Jesus are going to hell?

I don’t think the Bible teaches that. Jesus said, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God” (Matthew 5:8). He also said, “those who have done what is good will rise to live, and those who have done what is evil will rise to be condemned” (John 5:29). In Acts 10:35 the Apostle Peter said that God "accepts from every nation the one who fears him and does what is right."

People who lived before Jesus was born obviously never heard of him, and they didn’t all go to hell. For example it says in Genesis 5:24 that “Enoch walked faithfully with God.” Enoch lived thousands of years before Jesus. He didn't have a Bible, because it had not been written yet. He never heard of the 10 commandments or the covenant with Abraham. He knew nothing about the Old Testament kings and prophets and saints. But somehow he “walked with God,” and in due time God took him home. It has always seemed to me that there could be some modern-day Enoch living, say, in a remote jungle, who, though he knows nothing about Jesus, manages to “walk with God,” and God is merciful to him.

I’ve never met a Christian who said that all babies who die in infancy or all severely mentally retarded people go to hell because they cannot express faith in Jesus. We are saved through faith, the Bible says, but I think we instinctively and correctly understand this to mean that we who have the capacity to express faith are saved through it.

I do believe the Bible teaches that all people who are saved are saved through Jesus – whether they know it or not. Jesus himself said “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6). Peter said, “There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among people whereby we must be saved” (Acts 4:12).

The reason that salvation is only through Jesus is because he is the only one who paid the price for our sins. Even the best among us is still sinful. The Bible says, “If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us” (1 John 1:8). The Bible views sin as a debt that must be paid – and only Jesus, the sinless Son of God, could ever pay that debt. This he did by dying on the cross.

So everyone who is in heaven is there because Jesus paid his or her debt. Some will know all about that during their earthly lives, and others won’t find out who paid their way until they get to heaven.

I think of it kind of like an airplane carrying a load of sick, hungry, abused refugees from a place like Sudan to safety and abundance in the United States. Some of those refugees know that the plane was provided by the Red Cross, and they are grateful and cooperative, and they tell their fellow refugees about the organization that is providing for their deliverance. Other refugees have no clue. Some are babies, some are comatose, some have never heard of any kind of Cross. They just got on a plane that good people directed them to. All the refugees needed deliverance from the wretched conditions in their home country, and all who got to the United States arrived there on a Red Cross plane. But some were aware of their means of deliverance, and others not.

I believe that truly saved people want to do good. It seems to me that it is a good thing to be thankful to the one who provided our deliverance, and to do whatever we can to get to know him better, and to cooperate with him, and even to tell others about him. Many people in this life will never get the opportunities to do all that because they will never hear about Jesus, or they would not be able to understand even if they could hear. But if we do have that opportunity, it seems right to me to take advantage of it. It is kind of like a humble Sudanese refugee telling his fellow passengers, “Let me tell you about the Red Cross.”