Do the Hadza need Jesus?
My roommate has a subscription to National Geographic. When I was younger my father got a subscription to it, but I would only look at the pictures. Now I actually read the articles. One article in particular from the December 2009 issue struck my interest.
It's an article about a man who went and lived with the bush people known as the Hadza for two weeks. His portrait of them is of a content and happily ignorant people. They're unsentimental and don't get caught up in things like thinking about the future or setting up social hierarchies. Everything is shared between everybody and they have little personal possessions.
In particular this statement got me thinking,
"The Hadza are not big on ritual. There is not much room in their lives, it seems, for mysticism, for spirits, for pondering the unknown. There is no specific belief in an afterlife—every Hadza I spoke with said he had no idea what might happen after he died. There are no Hadza priests or shamans or medicine men. Missionaries have produced few converts."
Christianity's main message is salvation. That message fits so well with civilized life. Social interactions are messy. It's easy to throw life out of balance and get lost inside any number of different excesses. The mechanics of daily modern survival require constantly looking into the future; What'll happen to me tomorrow, twenty years from now, eighty years from now, after I die?
Jesus works with that system, Jesus is good for that system. What about for people like the Hadza though? Will they be eternally punished for their sins because they don't care to think of what happens after death? How can a people without possessions benefit from the Sermon on the Mount?
Christianity's form of salvation is great because it doesn't work on a tally system of good deeds and bad deeds. It's more about going in the right direction and having God make up the difference. But it also has issues because of the damnation factor. Damnation puts people into two groups; saints and the hell bound.
The general consensus among Christians is that in order to be saved, one must be in some sort of relationship with Christ and God. But that leads to the problems of people who've never heard the gospel or people like the Hadza who can't understand the importance of the gospel. Are they a special circumstance when it comes to salvation or are they just out of luck?