This week Religion News Service carried on article (I also heard about it on CNN) concerning extraterrestrial evangelism — or the lack of a need for it.
According to information in the official Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano,The Rev. Jose Gabriel Funes, director of the Vatican Observatory,said that creatures beyond earth may have never fallen into sin and therefore would not be in need of salvation.
“It is not a given that they have need of redemption,” he said according to the report. “They may have remained in full friendship with their Creator.”
But the Vatican’s top astronomer noted that extraterrestrial creatures could be mired in the sad state of sin like us earthlings as well — and need God’s mercy.
Either way, he is not limiting God’s creative potential to this one ball we call home.
“Just as a multiplicity of creatures exists on the Earth, so there could be other creatures, even intelligent ones, created by God,” he said.
Funes also said the Catholic Church learned some faith-science lessons from its mistreatment of Galileo, the 17th-century astronomer who insisted the earth rotated rather than the sun. Church leaders have become more tolerate of scientific possibilities.
But one must wonder what Baptists might think about this. Perhaps Bold Mission Thrust 2 will be even more challenging than the first.
Director of the Jesus Worldview Initiative at Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee and former executive editor and publisher at Good Faith Media.
