Q. If there are intelligent beings on other planets, are they saved by Christ’s death, too?
Any response to this question has to be highly speculative, of course, but let me share some thoughts.
When I was in college, this same question would sometimes be asked of speakers who came to share the gospel on campus. (I guess it was an updated version of the question, “What about people who never get the chance to hear?”) The speaker would typically say, very confidently, “If there are intelligent beings on other planets, then God went to those planets, took on the form of those beings, and died for them, too.” This response certainly reflects the relentless love of God, who comes to seek and save the lost, wherever they might be found, and so this answer is satisfying in many ways.
But in more recent years, I’ve been wondering whether Jesus’ incarnation on earth instead represented a unique entrance of God into all of time and space, just as it certainly represented a unique entrance into our specific world. (Christ did not come to earth many times, to die separately for the people of different times and places.) If that’s the case, then if there are intelligent beings on other planets, and we discover their existence, then it’s our responsibility to tell them about how God’s saving love has been shown definitively through the life, teachings, death, and resurrection of Jesus, and invite them to follow him, too.
And here’s one other possibility. Since these intelligent beings on other planets, by definition, are not members of Adam’s race, perhaps they are not fallen. (The premise of C.S. Lewis’s book Perelandra is that there are intelligent beings on Venus who have not yet fallen; the mission of the book’s central character, Ransom, is to keep them from falling.) And if this extraterrestrial race is not fallen, then it is still enjoying unbroken fellowship with God. But that doesn’t mean that those beings wouldn’t benefit from Christ’s death; it would just mean something different for them. It would still be a revelation of God’s saving love, showing how far God would go to bring them back if they ever did fall away, and I’d like to think that as such, in some sense, it would have a “saving” effect by drawing their hearts even closer to God.
I realize that I’m getting into some murky theological waters here, specifically, the distinction between (1) the belief that the fall was inevitable because it was the means God had chosen to become the occasion of our salvation and (2) the belief that the fall was not necessary or inevitable; people could just as easily have used their freedom to choose obedience rather than disobedience. But I won’t go into this distinction any further here, as I’ve discussed it in another post.
But I will acknowledge here that anyone who believes that the fall of the human race was inevitable will also conclude that any intelligent beings (free moral agents) on other planets have also fallen, too, and thus need either for Christ to come and die for them on their planet, or else for us to share with them the good news of what Christ has done definitively for the whole creation through his death on a cross here on earth.
Good Question 