Talespinner

The Great Lion and the Faithful Calormene

My mind has been dwelling, as of late, on an interesting commentary from CS Lewis, presented at the end of The Last Battle. At the end of the world, there was a lone Calormene soldier named Emeth, who was devoted to the pagan god Tash, who was always known to be an enemy of Aslan. It is revealed in The Last Battle that Tash is, indeed, a real god; a terrible, evil entity. Emeth is a devout follower of Tash, but unlike his brethren, he is empathetic, loyal, and righteous, and believes that these traits should be exemplified in the worship of Tash.

When he goes to meet Tash, he is greeted not by the great demon, but instead by the Lion Aslan. And there, once he gazes upon Aslan, he realizes that Aslan is the one that he should have been serving, and he despairs, for he has served the wrong god. And then Aslan says something interesting. Something that, I think, lines up with the soteriology and theology that we find in Christ’s examples through the gospels:

“I take to me the services which thou hast done to Tash … if any man swear by him and keep his oath for the oath’s sake, it is by Me that he has truly sworn, though he know it not, and it is I who reward him.”

He goes on and says more that clarifies this position. He claims all of Emeth’s works done in Tash’s name for himself, as if he’d done them all in Aslan’s name all along. And he even says that he has done them in Aslan’s name. Aslan then says that any evil done in his name was really done in Tash’s, because that is Tash’s nature, just as faithfulness, kindness and integrity are Aslan’s.

I find this interesting on a philosophical level. We often take it for granted that “God is Good.” We don’t really do the logical math on that. We use “God is good” like we use “Lasagna is good.” “Good” is an adjective to describe God. We mean God is good at something, or he is morally good, or he is pleasing to us. I think that little sentence means something different, though. I think it means “God is Good.”“Good,” here, is a noun, not an adjective. The sentence changes from a descriptor to an identifier.

A statement like that, laid out using logical nomenclature, would look like “God=Good.” You begin to see the difference before I even tweak it. But then, with the properties of that equals sign, we can logically change it to “Good=God.” Here, we have the theological premise that God not only has the quality of Good, He defines and truly embodies it. Without God there is no good, neither in definition nor in substance.

This makes some weighty implications about Christian theology as I understand it, but the more I learn and the more I think it over, I begin to believe that any other view is irreconcilable to the Christ that I know, the Christ that I see in the Bible and the Spirit that lives in my heart.

What this says to me is that those who have loved goodness and righteousness as best they could, have in turn loved Christ as best they could, whether they have heard His name or not. If Lewis’s idea is right and all good done is done in Christ’s name (and I now cannot see how that could be anything but true, when we think of God as the source and definition of all good), then anyone in the world, no matter who they serve in name (or truly, if they have served no one at all), has served Christ, as long as they loved goodness and righteousness.

This, I believe, brings the parable of the sheep and the goats in Matthew 25 into a different light. The confusion of the “sheep” when Christ tells them that they cared for him in his time of need seems to mirror the confusion that Emeth showed when Aslan told him that he had been working in his name, not Tash’s. Furthermore, the criteria for the separation in the parable was how they acted to their brethren, not whose name they acted in. Those who loved Good were accepted, and those who did not were cast out. The names under whom they worked mattered not at all.

This, I think, is the most satisfactory answer to the question of what happens to those who have not heard the Gospel, but who lived a good life. It lines up the best with what I have come to understand about God’s nature. He is not a God to leave his children behind—he will leave the flock to find the one lost sheep. He is not a God to allow semantics or circumstances to separate him from his own. What does this God care if some of his children served in the name of Zeus, or Waigongi, or in no name at all, so long as they served in such a way to make him proud and reflect his very own nature in their hearts?

I believe that this is why Paul in Athens, and the friends and family of Nate Saint in South America, preached Christ not as a separate being, but as the completion of the religions their proselytes already practiced. They already had the concepts of good and evil. They knew how to be kind to their fellow man, and they knew that they should. Most, if not all, of those cultures even had the concept of a perfect God and man’s imperfection and the consequential rift between the two.

I appreciate Christ’s depiction of God as our father. What good father would be upset when his son, having become a good man and being lifted high for all the world to see, thanked his father and gave him credit for his successes using the pet name his son had used for him as a child, or by saying “dad,” instead of by his proper, full name? No good father would be upset by that, much less disown his son for not using his proper name. He would be proud that his son had become such a great man, no matter what his son chose to call him.

Now, obviously there are differences between other religions and Christianity. That is why Christianity is always taught as the completion of those religions. And when presented with a choice between one of those religions and Christianity, we should obviously prefer the whole story to an incomplete one. But is it necessary for those who have not heard the Gospel to know that their savior’s name is Christ, or that he died on a cross 1,979 years ago to absolve everyone from their sins? Surely not, because we know that knowledge is not what saves us. It is a state of the heart that holds the same love that Christ showed us. And if God is Good, if God is Love, and we act out of Goodness and Love, then our lives are full of Goodness and Love, and thus our lives and our hearts are full of God himself, and that sounds a lot like salvation and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, doesn’t it?

Knowing God as I know him, such a being of complete benevolence would not shun someone who has loved him throughout their entire lives just because they did not know his name or what he did for them.

But what of those who are of another religion, who honor God though they know it not, and are then brought into contact with Christianity and reject it? Well, clearly one of two things must be true: either they did not love God—otherwise they would have recognized the completion of the virtues they have been taught to revere—or the Christianity being presented to them is not truly the completion of the virtues, but simply another rigid social construct dressed up to resemble true Christianity. One or the other must be fake, in this situation, or else the person in question is not seeing one or the other (or both) clearly for what they are.

I do not believe this understanding in any way diminishes the urgency of the Great Commission. We are still to make disciples of all nations. Christ would not have revealed himself to us if we were not meant to emulate him. Those who do not have the complete story may not be damned without the Gospel, but they can certainly benefit from knowing the whole story. If they love God as born-again Christians love him, they must thirst to know him better, just as we do, and knowing him and his character better will only enrich their lives and enable them to love better, just as it does for us.

Paul seems to believe this as well, not only because of his method of ministering to the Athenians who worshiped at the temple of the Unknown God, but also because of what he wrote in Romans 2:13-15:

“For it is not those who hear the law who are righteous in God’s sight, but it is those who obey the law who will be declared righteous. (Indeed, when Gentiles, who do not have the law, do by nature things required by the law, they are a law for themselves, even though they do not have the law. They show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness, and their thoughts now accusing, now even defending them.)”

Paul seems to say here, “It’s not what you know, it’s what you do.” He goes on to say that the laws, in part, are written on the very hearts of man. This, I think, is evident from human behavior. For the most part, we know how to be good to one another, and we know that we should be good to one another. And while it is indeed good to know God better, I think some consideration should be given to the fact that God chose to leave the most important part etched on our hearts; not his name, or even the story of our salvation, but the goodness that defines his existence, or perhaps more accurately, the goodness that his existence defines.

The goodness within the heart of each man is that divine spark that stoicism speaks of so often. It is the breath of Life that God breathed into the lungs of the first man, the ember that burns within the soul of every human who has ever lived since then. The facts around which we have constructed our religions play only a supporting role (albeit a strong one) to the goodness that we are called to embody. If the religion were the point, God would have engraved that upon our hearts, instead. No, the religion, the law, is, as Christ put it, only a tool to show us where we should be. It is a mirror into which we can look to see, albeit dimly, how God sees us. It is there to help us be good, but if we can be good without the help of the law, without the trappings of religion that we’ve constructed, as Paul says, all the better!

So, I think, we should keep in mind what God deemed to be the more important aspect of our lives and of our salvation. We are to love those around us as he loved us, and to love him with all of our hearts. We must keep that in mind at all times, because I don’t know of any adage that states “God is Doctrine,” or “God is Advanced Theology. No, God is Good. God is Love. God is Righteous. And he’s called us to be those things, too. So we need to remember that those are the end goals. The doctrine is there to help us, but the doctrine is not the object. And if the doctrine ever gets in the way of our doing good to one another, either we are misinterpreting the doctrine, or the doctrine is wrong.

Don’t let men’s interpretation of God’s commands get in the way of fulfilling his purpose for your life. He’s etched his law on your heart. Everybody’s got a copy, he’s made sure of that. Don’t try to godly. Be Good, and godliness will follow. In the end, they’re really the same thing.

Because God is Good.