Christian Atheism?

Back in the article "Believe propositions p and q and thou shall be saved" I argued against the view that the necessary and sufficient conditions for a saving relationship with God are found in the mental assent to one or more propositions. This raised many intriguing questions and possibilities in the following thread, including the one raised by Ken Pulliam concerning "Christian Atheism":

I have an acquaintance and he calls himself a "Christian Atheist." He believes Jesus was a good teacher with some good principles and he tries to live by them. However, he does not believe Jesus is God nor does he believe in any gods at all.

For ease of reference, let's call Ken's acquaintance Lemmy. Can Lemmy be a Christian atheist?

On the one hand this is easy enough to answer. If Lemmy defines Christian atheist as an atheist who thinks that Jesus was a cool guy, then I guess there can be a Christian atheist. (By the same token, if we define "immaterial materialist" as a Berkeleyan idealist who is also hedonistic, then there can be an immaterial materialist.)

The interesting question is not whether Lemmy can imbue novel meaning to the word Christian which would make "Christian atheist" no longer contradictory. Who's to stop him? The Institute for the Continued Use of Terms with their Current Meaning? 

Rather, the interesting question, and the one I take to be implied by Ken's comments, is whether Lemmy can be in saving relationship with God even while disbelieving in the existence of God and his revelation in Jesus.

At first blush this seems unlikely. That is, if Christianity is true then it seems unlikely that Lemmy is in a saving relationship with God. In "Believe propositions p and q and thou shall be saved" I argued that one need not assent to the proposition "Jesus is Lord" in order to be saved, but I stressed that this does not mean one can believe anything and be saved.

To hammer the point home I presented the case of Elmo (not to be confused with the goggle-eyed muppet). Initially Elmo seems to hit the right doxastic notes, for he believes "Jesus is Lord" and "God raised Jesus from the dead". But alas things are more complex, for Elmo also believes:

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.

These three beliefs are, from a Christian perspective, disturbingly far off base. It is thus reasonable to conclude that if Christianity is true then it seems unlikely that Elmo is in saving relationship with God.

By the same token, while Lemmy starts out well by believing "Jesus was a good teacher" he is also disturbingly off base by believing that "God does not exist" and (by implication) "God did not raise Jesus from the dead". As a result, we might conclude that Lemmy is not in saving relationship with God.

But are we certain about Lemmy's situation? Let's complicate things further by throwing in the following backstory of Lemmy's life.

Lemmy is a Tutsi who was born in Rwanda in 1984. Though Lemmy survived the 1994 genocide, he saw his entire family massacred by Hutu pastors from his local church. Over the following weeks Lemmy incredibly managed to survive the attacks of other Hutu Christians and their bloodied machetes. Agonized over this trauma, Lemmy cannot reconcile the existence of God to the unimaginable suffering he experienced and witnessed. And he can never forget the horrors carried out by professing Christians.

Needless to say, while he still has a deep attraction toward the gospel presentation of Jesus, as an atheist Lemmy cannot believe Jesus is anything more than a great human teacher.

Lemmy now works in Rwanda for peace and reconciliation based on the pacifistic teachings of Jesus. He works with the poor and lives simply, driven by the concern that the horrors of Rwanda's genocide never be repeated. He thinks Jesus is a great teacher, but he is an atheist forged in the furnace of genocide.

Can the Christian say with certainty that Lemmy could not be in a saving relationship with God?