Replies

When exploration of the New World - well, new to Europe - began, the debate on whether these totally different people, the indigenous peoples or “Indians,” were really human or not. The Church decided that they were and therefore they had to be evangelized. And of course, once they were baptized, the cutest of them could be married by Spaniards or other Catholics...hence, the mestizo culture of Latin America.

But it was a genuine debate, because Europeans hadn’t met people outside of their normal idea of “person” until that time. Of course, they didn’t have DNA testing, etc. and couldn’t determine “humanness” on that score.

Interestingly, among Southern Protestants in the 19th century, there was a theory that blacks and whites were created differently and that blacks weren’t quite as human as whites and thus didn’t have to be evangelized. This was basically to cover for states where preaching to African slaves was a crime, sometimes even (on paper) punishable by the death penalty, although I don’t think this was ever carried out or even charged.

What will happen in the future? Go and preach the Gospel to all nations...does this mean only to humans, or if, by some chance, we find creatures with a different, non-human DNA on some other planet some time in the future, does it mean that we preach the Gospel to them, too? Christ is the savior of nations and of the universe, so I would say that there is only one salvation and only one Savior. That is, what makes humans human is that we are made in the Image and Likeness of God, and therefore even other creatures that do not have our DNA but have certain things that enable us to recognize them (love, reason, speech, for example) may have to be acknowledged as one of the “nations” to whom we must preach.

It’s a frightening thought, but then again, who would ever have believed that somebody born of nobodies in the armpit of the Roman Empire would have been the Son of God?