Unbelievers, Then and Now

Within evangelical circles it isn’t unusual to find leaders delineating a stark contrast between “believers” and “unbelievers” — people who can be identified as true Christians versus those who are clearly not recognizable as such. Some evangelicals use the term “Christian” to refer to themselves in contrast to adherents of other traditions thought to be less worthy of that label. I recall an incident some years ago when the local Roman Catholic archbishop was a guest speaker at an evangelical Christian college. He was somewhat taken aback when a student in the audience raised a question about the difference between Catholics and “Christians.”

It’s not uncommon for an evangelical pastor to decline to perform a marriage ceremony for a couple if he believes one of the partners is an “unbeliever.” Such a refusal is based on the admonition of the apostle Paul in 2 Corinthians 6:14: “Do not be unequally yoked with unbelievers.” An “unequal yoke” is held to be inappropriate for any joint enterprise whether a marriage, a business partnership, or any relationship of common cause. For example, the late Jerry Falwell’s “Moral Majority” movement received criticism because it embraced a diversity of religious groups, not only evangelical Christians but Mormons and others.

The stricture against an “unequal yoke” therefore raises the question of how, from a Christian standpoint, one defines an “unbeliever.” We can approach the issue by asking a simple question: “How many Gods are there?” In posing that question to a general audience today in our Western culture, we are likely to hear the answer: “one.” For people in our cultural environment it seems logical to reduce the inventory of divinities to a single member, namely the God who is understood to be the Creator of the universe. While people may effectively worship many entities, in particular their own selves, the appellation “God” is generally held to apply to only one entity.

But if we were to ask this question, “How many Gods are there?” in the Roman world of the first century, “one” is not the answer we would likely receive. The Roman world was awash in “gods” — not only the traditional pantheon of Zeus, Athena and the rest but also local divinities attached to various cities, family gods, divinities connected with trades and occupations, and in particular Caesar himself who, having declared his predecessor to be divine, claimed to now be the “son of god.” Life in the Mediterranean world involved everyone in a constant veneration of the gods appropriate to whatever situation in which one found himself. Such veneration was expected, and to abstain from it rendered a person socially suspect, even subversive to the social order.

Consider, then, the suspicion that would be directed toward people who became Christians and were therefore converted to the worship of the one God, the singular Deity worshiped by the Jewish community out of which the Christian church emerged. The Jews themselves, in a way, received a “pass” from the mandatory worship of the multiplicity of gods; the pragmatic Romans, recognizing the Jews’ fanatical monotheism, looked the other way when that community declined to take part in the public religious functions. But non-Jews who became monotheistic Christians were another matter, and their refusal to take part in the polytheism of their neighbors even led to the accusation that Christians were atheists.

Nevertheless, the Christians’ worship of the one God was a hallmark of their faith that distinguished their belief from the beliefs of others in their environment. As the apostle Paul wrote, “For although there may be so-called gods in heaven or on earth — as indeed there are many ‘gods’ and many ‘lords’ — yet for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist” (1 Corinthians 8:6). For Christians, the “gods” of their neighbors were mere idols, or even demons. When Paul urges the Corinthian Christians to avoid being unequally yoked with unbelievers, he adds, “What agreement has the temple of God with idols? For we are the temple of the living God” (2 Corinthians 6:16). So when Paul urges the Corinthian Christians to avoid being unequally yoked with “unbelievers,” the unbelievers he was referring to were not people who would entertain no religious belief in God. To the contrary, these “unbelievers” were people whose lives were inundated with gods, who were therefore not unreligious but hyper-religious.

This suggests that an evangelical pastor who declines to marry a couple on the basis of Paul’s admonition in 2 Corinthians 6:14 might reconsider what it means to be an unbeliever in the New Testament sense. To most people in contemporary Western culture an “unbeliever” would be someone who has no belief in God, but that’s not the person to whom Paul is referring. If a Christian comes to his or her pastor desiring to marry someone who hasn’t made an express profession of Christian faith, it might be well to ask some pointed questions of the projected marital partner before flatly refusing to perform the ceremony. Far from being the polytheistic “unbeliever” to which Paul refers, the applicant’s projected partner may be very close to affirming the oneness of God that is a hallmark of Christian belief. And he or she may not be far from affirming a personal commitment to Jesus as the revelation of the one living God, the “way, the truth, and the life.”

Why Don’t People Accept Christianity?

A discussion group I once belonged to was reading a book on how men can live the Christian life. At one point the author suggested that people reject the Christian faith because they believe the Bible “puts them in bondage” to a moral standard they don’t want to live up to.

I disagree with that assessment. I believe that if people really believed in God, and accepted the Bible as the expression of his purpose, they would be glad to have a guide by which they could align themselves with the purposes of the Creator of the universe. In this way they could enjoy the benefits of being in partnership with God, and even aspire to being “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4).

So the issue is not that people resent the standards set by biblical Christianity and seek to escape them. The problem is that they don’t believe such standards exist in the first place, because there is no Authority who has decreed them. In their view, when Christians uphold a biblical standard for life they’re simply parroting the opinions of the biblical authors, benighted souls who lived in a dark, pre-scientific age and thought they had heard from some supernatural Source who really isn’t there. Today, of course, we know so much more than they did — in an observable universe of 300 billion galaxies 93 billion light years across (or whatever the latest numbers are), how can there be such a God as the one depicted in the Bible? Or if there is a God somewhere, how could any human being really hear from him?

In reaching people with the message of the Christian faith, the first task is to show that the perspective, or “world view,” I have just described is erroneous. It should be made evident that the Scriptural authors had a deeper perception of reality than the “flat” view that modernity imposes upon us. The biblical witness needs to be related to what cosmologists and atomic physicists are finding out about the nature of the universe, and what comprises it.

For example, there’s no way to avoid the view that this still-expanding universe of space, time and matter had a beginning similar to that described in the opening verses of the Book of Genesis. That light appeared after the “big bang,” as a separate stage in creation (Genesis 1:3), becomes plausible in terms of the theory that the plasma of the universe expanded to something close to its present size in the first split second after creation — expanding faster than the speed of light, which itself had to first be differentiated from that primordial plasma that was “without form and void” (Genesis 1:2).

As another example, the “stuff” of the universe appears to be solid, but in fact all matter is mostly space. The distance between subatomic particles (protons, neutrons, electrons, etc.) is comparable in scale to the distance between bodies of our solar system. I have seen it stated that if that space between particles were eliminated all the matter of the universe could be collapsed into something similar in size to a golf ball. Moreover, those “particles” are themselves made up of sub-particle entities, right down to what some theorists call “strings” that vibrate multi-dimensionally, not just in the four dimensions of space-time that we can experience. Whatever the case, it’s evident that the basis for all matter is some kind of frequency, not a material substance at all, and that “what is seen was made out of things which do not appear” (Hebrews 11:3). A non-material entity of some kind is required to sustain the shape of the material substance of the universe. Hence the Scriptures speak of Christ “upholding the universe by his word of power” (Hebrews 1:3).

These are only a few examples of where the biblical writers are far more insightful than most people give them credit for when it comes to understanding what is “really real.” By the Spirit of God, the apostle Paul states, they have been given a window into “what no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man conceived” (1 Corinthians 2:9). Cosmologists are only beginning to comprehend realities those ancient authors hinted at. They wrote in language the culture of their times could understand, but their perception of truth was deeper than what they’re often given credit for today.

So why do people reject the Bible, and the Christian faith based upon its witness? I believe it’s because they’ve never been presented with the evidence for the depth of the Scriptures’ understanding of the nature of reality. Their idea that the Bible is the product of outmoded perceptions of the universe is rarely challenged. Nor has their shallow world view that sees everything in flat, materialistic terms been subjected to the insights upon which both the Bible and contemporary science agree.

Francis Schaeffer suggested that in our culture the first premise of the gospel is not that “Christ died for our sins” but rather that God is real and we have to deal with him. Typically the church presents the gospel as the message that Christ died on the cross to atone for the sin that prevents us from being connected with God. But if there’s no God to whom to be connected, there’s no sin that needs to be atoned for because there are no moral or behavioral standards. So such a truncated “gospel” can safely be ignored, for it’s irrelevant within the contemporary cultural paradigm or world view.

Only when the Creator comes to be understood in terms of the vastness and mystery of the universe he has brought into being can any gospel that calls us to be accountable to him be taken seriously. Yes, sin is real — sin against the way things have been made, and therefore against the Maker of all things (see Romans 1:19 ff.). Sin is a disregard of God’s purpose for human life, and of his design of this universe. Once that sin can be exposed the way is open to offer the work of Jesus as its undoing.

Sometimes it is said that the teachings of the Bible have to be taken “on faith.” Decades ago one of my seminary professors quipped, “Faith doesn’t mean believing what you know isn’t true” — yet so often faith seems to be presented as if that were the case. But we don’t need to take the Scriptures “on faith,” nor to impose that requirement on people who don’t take them seriously. Instead, we take the Bible as a witness to what is demonstrably most deeply real and true about the nature of the universe, and the life we live within it.

Originally written 12-2012, revised 2-2025