Wilson, Stackhouse, and Inclusivism

Doug Wilson has a good critique of a couple points in John Stackhouse’s inclusivism. Stackhouse makes the following claims:

This is the fundamental posture of faith, and from this passage [Heb. 11], as from many others in the Bible, it is obvious that one does not have to know about Jesus to adopt this posture that results in salvation.

All I am arguing for here is that we do not confine salvation to this normal mode, shutting off any other possibilities and therefore implying, if we don’t say so outright, that millions of people have been lost forever simply because they lived in Asia, or Europe, or Africa, or the Americas, or anywhere else before gospel preaching got there.

Wilson responds by pointing out that the real issue is human wickedness, not where people may live and whether or not they have heard the gospel.

But nobody is lost because of where they live. People are lost because they are evil—you know, wicked. Sinful.

We don’t proclaim Jesus because we are fixing the problem of “not having heard about Jesus.” We proclaim Jesus because we are addressing the problem of death, genocide, hatred, murder, rape, slave prostitution, senseless war, snarling greed, and as they say on television, much, much more. The problem with the inclusivist position is not that it is eager for the people to be included—every Christian wants that. The problem is that when we define the standard downward like this, at the end of the day we find that we have included much more than the people—we have opened the door to great wickedness as well. This may sound outlandish, but there it is. Tender-hearted accommodation leads to great hardness of heart. And a hardline conservatism at this point, ironically, is tender-hearted.

Read the whole post at Wilson’s blog.

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