[asa] Isolated humans

I'm enjoying listening to a 36-lecture course on human pre-history by Brian Fagan from U. Cal at Santa Barbara. It is fascinating, filling in lots of details that I hadn't appreciated. (If any of you are interested, you are welcome to come to the ASA office and borrow a set).

The last few lectures left me with a question (a very old one) that touches on several of the recent threads on this list. Fagan described the migration of humans to the Americas around 14,000ya. Within only a few thousand years, they had spread throughout north and south america. During that time, with the ending of that ice age, the ocean levels rose about 300 feet, effectively cutting off all human travel and communication between the Americas and Asia or Europe. Similar stories hold for Australia, New Zealand, and other places.

The question I have is not a new one, and has been hashed around a lot, but it does still bother me. Hitchens referred to it in his book and debate as well. How do we understand the notion that the gospel of Christ's incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection, with all its soterial implications, is the unique path for reconciliation to God when a significant portion of the human population did not even have the possibility of hearing about the gospel?

Coming from a very mission-minded church, I've always heard pleas for "reaching those who have never heard" the gospel, with the responsibility on our shoulders to heed the great commission to share the good news. Somehow, the fact that a significant part of the world could not be reached for many centuries with any technology available no matter how zealous we may be, seems to put a different twist on it.

If "original sin" dates back to the common human ancestral community, however that occurred, how is it that there is no commonly available gospel? The thread on natural theology revealed several different views of whether and how much we could learn about God through nature. I didn't hear anyone argue that we could learn about salvation from nature.

The standard answers I grew up with seemed to revolve around God's accountability for humans being set relative to the amount of information/revelation we had so that all were without excuse. That's where Romans was usually cited. That of course led to the inevitable retort that we should leave indigenous people in their ignorance. Which didn't help matters.

Far be it from any of us to question why God did it this way or claim "God surely wouldn't have done that" or the like. Yet, I confess it does leave me with a most uncomfortable feeling. Yes, I suppose I should just be content with "that's the way it is" but....

Randy

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Received on Fri Nov 2 17:00:08 2007