Author Interview
Terrance Tiessen
Terrance Tiessen, author of Who Can Be Saved?
IVP: What's Irenaeus got to do with it? Tell us about how you got into this topic.
Terrance Tiessen: In the early 1980s I became aware that scholars were identifying some secondcentury theologians as early forerunners of Karl Rahner's concept of "anonymous Christianity." I chose to write my Ph.D. dissertation on Irenaeus's theology of revelation, with particular attention to the question of the salvation of the unevangelized. In the course of that study, I concluded that Irenaeus had no concept of the "unevangelized," because he assumed the world to have been reached through mission by the apostles. Nevertheless, I asked Irenaeus a question he had never considered and was surprised by my own conclusion that Irenaeus's doctrines of revelation and salvation would have made him optimistic about the possibility that some who are ignorant of the gospel might be saved. That was not my own understanding of Scripture, but it seemed clear to me that it was where Irenaeus was headed. The subject continued to be of interest to me, and I continued to read and think about it in the years that followed.
IVP: You have chosen the term accessibilism to describe your position. How did you arrive at that term?
Tiessen: I came across the term accessibilism in an article by William Lane Craig and decided that it captures nicely the essence of what I now believe to be biblical. About ten years ago, I became convinced, much to my own surprise, that God may save people whom he does not reach with the gospel. For some years I expressed my thought in terms of the widely used typology of exclusivism, inclusivism and pluralism. For my own purposes, a particular problem arose because of confusion about the definition of inclusivism. Some writers use it to describe merely the belief that the unevangelized can be saved, but others include the belief that the religions of the world are instruments that God uses to bring people to salvation. By the first of these criteria my position is inclusivist, but not by the second. Accessibilism struck me as capturing very nicely what I have come to believe. Salvation is accessible wherever God chooses to apply the work of Christ by his Spirit, and he can do this even where new covenant revelation is not known.
IVP: Some evangelicals will wonder whether your proposal doesn't dull our motive for mission. But much of your life has been invested in missions. Briefly, how do you respond?
Tiessen: I am well aware of the concern that the nerve of missionary motivation will be cut if we inform people that God can save people without the ministry of missionaries. In earlier years I shared that concern, and I appealed to people to go and send and pray for missionaries because without that human witness, people would be irrevocably damned. When I came to believe that Scripture did not support that view, I also noticed that the New Testament provides very strong motivation for missionary work without ever basing its appeal on this ecclesiocentric or restrictivist ground.
The good news concerning Jesus is God's ordinary means for bringing sinners into relationship with himself and maturing them in communities of faith that provide a small foretaste of life in the kingdom of God. Evangelism is not just about getting individuals saved from eternal condemnation, it is about bringing into being new covenant communities of people in and through whom God is working to turn back the ravages of sin--personal and social--and to establish his reign on earth. It is hard to overstate the blessing of knowing that we are God's people, who live in his love and constant care, and whom he gifts to be a blessing to other believers and to the world. If we really love people and want them to flourish, we will want them to be part of the church and of God's continuing work of transformation in and through it. I believe that we should rejoice in the thought that some of God's elect are among those whom the church, in its weakness or disobedience, has not reached with the gospel, and at the same time be passionate about serving God's purposes for the well-being of those people, here and now. Few things are more exciting to a missionary than the surprise of finding that God has been at work before we arrive with the gospel and that people's hearts are already turned toward God and eager to receive his fuller revelation. Why would it disturb us that God may have saved some of those people, particularly ones who had lived and died in the years before we got there?
IVP: You take very seriously the question of whether or not God saves infants or the unborn. What does this issue have to do with the salvation of the unevangelized?
Tiessen: I have noticed that many Christians are reluctant to assert that the unborn or infants who die young are condemned to hell without benefit of Christ's saving work. Many evangelicals appeal to a doctrine of the "age of accountability" to deal with the fate of these people, but others state categorically that all these people are saved by Christ because of their inculpable ignorance or inability. It fascinates me though, that people who show this admirable sympathy for infants seem much less concerned about the large number of adults who live and die without any knowledge of Jesus. I see these as groups within the general class of the "unevangelized." They are sinners who need salvation but who do not know the gospel. I argue that our doctrine of salvation should account for all of the groups of the unevangelized and that it should do so in a consistent way. I hear a clear biblical statement that every human being is a sinner who needs God's salvation and that the only means by which God ever saves anyone is by grace through faith. There are no exceptions to this principle and so we have to unpack how it works in the varied situations of human existence.
IVP: To what extent does a biblical view of God's justice and mercy "drive" your thesis?
Tiessen: By its very nature, grace entails that no one deserves it. So, since everyone is a sinner, God could justly leave us all to suffer the consequences of our rebellion. He has no obligation to show mercy to any of us. Synergists like Charles Finney have argued for the accessibility of salvation on the basis of God's justice, but I cannot do so. When God showed himself to Moses, he described himself as "the Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness" (Ex 34:6). God spoke his last and fullest word in his Son (Heb 1:2), and in Jesus we see a God so tender and compassionate, so troubled by the plight of people suffering under sin, and so passionate about delivering them from all forms of bondage, that I think we have much reason to be hopeful that God's grace and mercy to sinners will be very great. So the mercy of God is a much larger driving theme in my construct than is his justice.
IVP: What would your top five iterations of the following be? "I am not saying that _________."
Tiessen: Now that is a really tough question. From previous experience, I know the perils of being misunderstood and misrepresented. These come most immediately to mind: I am not saying that everyone will be saved, only that there is no group or class of people concerning whom we can say that none of them will be saved. I am not saying that anyone is saved by any means other than the saving work of Christ and God's gracious gift of repentance and faith that he gives by his Spirit. I am not saying that the various religions of the world are agencies that God has raised up as means of his saving work in the lives of any of their adherents. I am not saying that there is a second chance for people at or after death if they have rejected God's revelation up to the end of their lives, although I do postulate that some who have previously been saved by faith (including infants and other unevangelized) will first place their faith in the person of Christ when they meet him at the moment of death. I am decidedly not saying that because God can and may save some apart from the church's witness to Jesus, we need not make costly sacrifices to bring to everyone in the world the gospel, which God uses with saving power and which marvelously transforms the lives of individuals and of whole communities.
IVP: I can hear readers objecting that your proposal is too speculative, that at best we should claim an agnosticism when it comes to the salvation of the unevangelized. How do you respond?
Tiessen: I invite these people to read my book with their Bibles open and an eagerness to hear the Spirit speak. As with all theological construction, I do make some second-order inferences and, admittedly, an occasional speculation, but I am convinced that the proposal I am putting forward arises out of Scripture. I will be delighted if this exercise expands the hopefulness of some of these agnostics and generates a new excitement about God's gracious saving program in this fallen world.
IVP: The second part of your book delves into theology of religions, where you answer the question, "How do the religions fit into God's purposes in the world?" Why does your answer to "Who can be saved?" call for an answer to the second question--in the same book?
Tiessen: Once we acknowledge that God is working in both grace and judgment outside of the church, we naturally begin to ponder the religions, the largest of which have been very unaffected by the church's missionary attempts among them. So I thought it necessary to speak to this issue as well. Sadly, many Christians who are optimistic about the extent of God's saving work in the world also assume that the world's religions are the means God is using to achieve salvation, and they conclude that we should leave other religions alone and stop missionary work among them. On the other hand, since September 11, 2001, many Christians in North America have felt a new urgency to figure out how we should assess other religions and how we should relate to their members. I have tried to unpack answers to these questions that are consistent with the Calvinistic accessibilism that I put forward in the first part of the book.
IVP: Finally, what are your hopes for this book?
Tiessen: My hopes for the book are different for different sorts of readers. I hope to help some readers to be more critically discerning about other religions and their members while opening up others to see God in places where they would not have looked for him before. I hope that Arminians will be happy to find that Calvinism need not be pessimistic about God's gracious purposes in the world. I also hope that Calvinists will be led to reconsider some of their own readings of Scripture. I would be happy to see "four-point" Calvinists reconsidering the consistency of their position as a result of my treatment of the trinitarian work of salvation. On the other hand, I think that my proposal concerning universal sufficient grace is a helpful tweaking of Calvinist soteriology, and I will be delighted if some Calvinist theologians give it serious consideration.
As always, I hope most of all that God will be glorified as a result of my writing this book and your publishing it. It troubles me that some people will probably think it dangerous, without even reading it. I am excited about God's great program of salvation and about the privilege he has given us to participate in its realization through gospel proclamation and demonstration. I sense an urgent need for Christians to do better as God's ambassadors in the context of the world's religions. I am praying that God may use this book in positive ways to further his purposes in these areas.