Believe propositions p and q and thou shall be saved

It all started when Ken Pulliam asked "What do you think that a person must believe in order to be saved?" Then came the substance of my subtle and richly nuanced response:) "I cannot provide a simple answer on the terms I have been given because I don't think the foundation of a saving relationship with God is found in belief at all."

This hardly means that a person can believe anything and be in a saving relationship with God. One cannot believe, for instance, that Jesus is the supreme embodiment of evil and be in a saving relationship with him. But it does steer us away from seeking a specific set of propositions that must necessarily be confessed for salvation to obtain.

Well needless to say I wasn't exactly thrown a tickertape parade to celebrate these views. Instead the crowd remained silent as they sported distinctly quizzical expressions. Then AnAtheist.net said his piece: "Paul seems pretty clear in his use of the conditional. 'If you do X and Y then you will be saved." The reference was to Romans 10:9, a verse I had referenced:

"That if you confess with your mouth, ‘Jesus is Lord,' and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved."

Doesn't that make belief in at least these two propositions - "Jesus is Lord", "God raised Jesus from the dead" - necessary and sufficient for salvation?

However, I had also referenced Jesus in Matthew 7:

"Not everyone who says to me, 'Lord, Lord,' will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven."

So what do we do here? AnAtheist.net offered a way to bring Jesus' warning in with Paul's statement:

"If the will of God is to have everyone to confess with his mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in his heart that God raised Jesus from the dead, then this not only confirms Paul's statement but makes it a much stronger bi-conditional. If God's will involves something else, then this is inconsistent with Paul's statement as those two conditions are no longer sufficient."

So we can resolve the two passages on this view by saying that part of doing God's will is believing that Jesus is Lord and God raised him from the dead.

The final nail in the coffin came with MGT2 who concurred with AnAtheist.net:

"In addition, Hebrews 11 declares that one must ‘believe' in order to come to God or to please Him, that is, to do His will. It seems to me that if you take away the foundation of belief as an imperative there is nothing left."

So what can I possibly say in rebuttal?

Let's begin here. I find AnAtheist.net's proposed exegesis of Matthew 7:21-23 completely indefensible. For one thing, it is a stretch, to say the least, to take the verb "do" (Greek: ποιῶν) and apply it to belief. "Okay Johnny, before I get home from work I want you to do the following things. First, cut the grass. Next, paint the fence. Third, believe that the number six is prime."

Belief doesn't work like that. It is not something that one can do on command. Belief cannot, strictly speaking, be the object of an imperative. "Just do it" does not apply to belief.

Rather, belief arises non-voluntarily based on evidence, psychological factors and other conditions. But belief is not "done" in anyway that one can be culpable for failing to believe. Mind you, one can be culpable for one's broader doxastic attitudes. For instance, one may fail to seek evidence to support one's beliefs, or one may believe whatever a trusted authority says, even when that authority has been shown to be a liar. But those are culpabilities attending to belief practices, not beliefs per se. Bottom line: it is simply a mistake to think that belief is something that is "done" like other actions.

(An aside: obviously there are evil beliefs. But it does no good to say to the white supremacist "Stop believing that!" Rather, you shall have to reason with him patiently until he finds himself disavowing his racist beliefs.)

Second, this reading completely ignores Jesus' statements elsewhere in Matthew which explain what he means by doing the will of the Father (and which do not reference Paul's two statements). In Matthew 25 Jesus provides the parable of the talents. Each individual thinks himself in right relationship with God but only the first two who increased their talents through works are found to be truly in relationship with him. The third who kept his talent but did not increase it is cast out into weeping and gnashing of teeth.

From there Jesus contrasts the sheep and the goats. The demarcation point here is how each one treated the poor. Jesus' final words of condemnation to the goats: "whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me." Note there is no castigation here at all over doxastic failure. Rather, it is all concerning action.

I am a theologian. I think right belief about God is enormously important. The more true beliefs we have about God and what it means to be in right relationship with him, the better. But that's very different from saying "this is the set of propositions you must believe in order to be saved." That, it seems to me, is a dangerously distorted view.

As I wind things down, let's turn back to Romans 10:9. I noted above that certain beliefs can exclude you from right relationship with God. Keeping that in mind, let's say that Elmo believes the following:

Jesus is Lord

God raised Jesus from the dead.

Jesus is human but not divine.

God is the evil creator of the material world.

Jesus defeated God after being raised and will deliver us from our material embodiment.

On the cognitive view of salvation that I am disputing, the first two propositions are what must be believed to be saved. Believe them and you're in. Well Elmo believes them. Is he in? That seems to me doubtful given his additional three beliefs. Yet another defeater to a wooden reading of Paul in Romans 10:9.

And here's another. What about the infant and the severely handicapped thirty year old and all the other marginal cases of people who cannot grasp our first two propositions? Are they lost?

Finally, for those interested I addressed these issues last year in "Do all Muslims go to hell?" and "He said he would prefer to go to hell...." In the first article I noted the case of a Christian who accepted our first two propositions even as he engaged in atrocities in Rwanda. Then I noted another case:

others engaged in selfless and brave acts in the midst of this living hell. One of them was Mbaye Diagne, a captain from the Senegalese army ... and a devout Muslim. Working for U.N. forces, Diagne repeatedly flouted the orders of his commanding officer not to save civilians. Instead, he ventured out time and again to pick up Tutsis in his Jeep - about five at a time - and transfer them to the relative safety of the UN compound. In order to accomplish this feat he repeatedly bargained his way across dozens of Hutu checkpoints using little more than cigarettes and his good humor. In this way Diagne saved more than a hundred lives before he was killed on May 31 from flying shrapnel.

Assuming that Diagne died a Muslim, can you be certain that he is in hell?