Megachurch pastor and Senate candidate Adam Hamilton speculated in a sermon that he would find members of non-Christian religions in heaven. The remarks came from a January 23, 2022 sermon, “Is the Bible True? Is Jesus the Only Way?” Hamilton preached the sermon at his Church of the Resurrection, the nation’s largest United Methodist congregation, with an attendance of nearly 10,000. On August 4, Hamilton won the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate in Kansas.

“My hunch is there’s going to be a whole lot of people you’d be surprised are going to be in heaven, because of the grace of God,” Hamilton speculated. “When it comes to other faiths, I believe, as a Christian, that they are going to — when they get to heaven — they’re going to see Jesus. And they’re going to say, ‘Ah it was you all the time, all along, that I was searching for.’ But I don’t fear that those folks will spend eternity in hell.”

Hamilton suggested that religions were like eyeglass lenses, where different people need different prescriptions to see God most clearly. “A Muslim would say through Islam they see the most clearly, and a Hindu through Hinduism, and a Jew through Judaism,” he proposed. “We all have a different lens that we’re seeing through, and … depending on how we were raised and how we think, one lens is, you know, clearly a better lens for me.”

After describing his journey through studying comparative religion, Hamilton explained, “When I finally got to Jesus and Christianity, it was like, I could see clearly. … In Christianity, we believe that God actually came and walked among us in the flesh … and when we look at Jesus we have the clearest picture we have of God.” He alluded to Colossians 1:15, where Paul says Jesus “is the image of the invisible God,” and Jesus’ words in John 14:9, “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.”

Christian theologians describe the “beatific [or happy] vision” as the goal of the Christian life. “Blessed [or happy] are the pure in heart,” Jesus said, “for they shall see God” (Matthew 5:8). When united with Christ in the New Jerusalem, believers “will see his face” (Revelation 22:4).

But Hamilton departed from orthodox Christian theology by suggesting that adherents of other religions can arrive at God without going through Jesus. Although he alluded to John 14:9, he forgot John 14:6, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”

Hamilton’s position is not quite equivalent to universalism, the notion that God is too loving to send anyone to hell, and so he plans to save everyone. “Bad religion obscures the image of God,” Hamilton suggested. “It ends up leading to oppression or harm or abuse. And there can be bad religion within every religion in the world, but there are certain religions that seem to lend themselves towards distorting the image of God. Not all religions are equally valid; some of them actually bring terrible harm to people, and some of them lead us to love our neighbors.”

Thus, Hamilton does argue that everyone will be saved, only the “good people,” as it were, from every religion.

As a proof text for this, Hamilton appealed to 1 Timothy 2:4-6, “[God our Savior] desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth. For there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself as a ransom for all.”

Calvinists and Arminians have disputed the meaning of these verses for hundreds of years (see, for instance, John Owen’s 1648 treatment in “The Death of Death in the Death of Christ”). The main issues of interpretation are the definitions of “desires” and “all.”

But Hamilton places himself far outside the boundaries of the Calvinist-Arminian debate by suggesting that God will save people by his grace, but not through faith in Jesus Christ (see Ephesians 2:8). “What about the people who don’t know to accept [Jesus]?” he asks. “God can give the saving work of Jesus. God can take that payment Jesus has made and apply it to anyone he chooses.” He suggests this is the case with those who die as infants, the mentally incapacitated, and the generations who lived from the dawn of human culture (he takes the evolutionary view) until the advent of Christ.

“God seems content to allow these humans to grapple for him without trying to give them all the answers,” Hamilton suggested of the ancients. He cites Paul’s speech in Athens, “he made from one man every nation of mankind … that they should seek God, and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him” (Acts 17:26-27). He interpreted Paul’s meaning “as though it was a bit of a game of hide-and-seek — the hidden God, you know, waiting for us to find him.” To make it more explicit, “when the Greco-Roman people were crying out to Zeus, they were really crying out to God. They didn’t know it, but they were crying out to God.”

Hamilton could have saved himself from this error if he had kept reading Paul’s sermon to the end, “The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed; and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead” (Acts 17:30-31). In other words, Paul past times of ignorance as a connection point with pagan Athens. But now that Jesus Christ has come, he is the only way of salvation. Anyone who does not believe in him faces judgment.

This truth is affirmed by both sides of the Calvinism-Arminianism debate. In the Arminian Articles of Remonstrance (1610), the very first article affirms “that God … hath determined, out of the fallen, sinful race of men, to save in Christ, for Christ’s sake, and through Christ, those who, through the grace of the Holy Ghost, shall believe on this his son Jesus … and, on the other hand, to leave the incorrigible and unbelieving in sin and under wrath … according to the word of the Gospel in John 3:36.”

John 3:36 proclaims, “Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life; whoever does not obey the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God remains on him.”

Calvinist theologians responded with the Canons of Dort (1619), where Article 4 of the First Head of Doctrine states, “God’s wrath remains on those who do not believe this gospel. But those who do accept it and embrace Jesus the Savior with a true and living faith are delivered through him from God’s wrath and from destruction, and receive the gift of eternal life.”

In other words, both Calvinists and Arminians affirm that salvation is by God’s grace, but only through faith. “For in [the gospel] the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, as it is written, ‘The righteous shall live by faith’” (Romans 1:17). This verse expresses the core principle that unites all Christians, and Hamilton’s teaching seems to contradict it.

In fairness to Hamilton, he is not the only prominent thinker to claim that the Christian God will save those of other religions. In Texas, fellow Democratic Senate hopeful James Talarico said in a 2024 podcast, “I know personally that I've learned as much about my faith from Salman's [Bhojani] tradition, from the Islamic mystics, from poets like Rumi as much as I have from Christian authors and Christian writers.”

Even C.S. Lewis suggests this notion in “The Last Battle.” A Calormene soldier somehow finds his way into Aslan’s country. He encounters the “great Lion” and thinks, “Surely this is the hour of death, for the Lion (who is worthy of all honour) will know that I have served Tash [the cruel Calormene god] all my days and not him.” He answers, “Alas, Lord, I am no son of Thine but the servant of Tash,” to which Aslan responds, “Child, all the service thou hast done to Tash, I account as service done to me.”

But echoing C.S. Lewis is not in itself enough to excuse Hamilton’s misreading of Scripture. Christians take their theology from God’s Holy Word, not from any previous Christian, no matter how erudite.

Hamilton clearly preaches that good people from Islam, Hinduism, and other religions will make it to heaven. Jesus teaches that “No one is good except God alone” (Mark 10:18), and “No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6).