Would Life Outside Earth Need a Savior?
c. 2007 Doreen A. Mannion

I believe what the Bible says when it states that God sent his only son, Jesus Christ, to be the savior for all humanity on earth. I also believe that when Christ returns, there will be new heaven for all creation (Book of Revelation), not just humans. I do not think that those who lack a certain intellectual capacity and ability to choose whether to do right or do wrong need a savior. In this respect, I do not believe babies are born sinful and therefore do not need to be baptized or saved as infants. For the purposes of this paper, when I refer to life outside earth, I am not referring to creatures so unlike humans that understandable communication would not be possible.

I do not think life outside earth would need a savior apart from Christ. I believe that Christ as savior is savior for all times and all who sin. Acts 2:39 states the promise is for you, your children, and all who are far away. In John 10:16, we are told that Christ recognizes there are “sheep” outside the fold, which some interpret as leaving open the possibility of so-called “intelligent life” outside of earth. Most importantly to me, Colossians 1:15-20 emphasizes that Christ is “the image of the invisible God” and refers to things visible and invisible. The verses also refer several times to both earth and heaven.

If there is life outside earth that is able to discern between right and wrong, we cannot assume that this life sins. In the 19th century, Joseph Pohle put forth a hypothesis of a many inhabited earths. He felt that since the universe is so vast and since creation was to give glory to God,

...such glory must be bestowed by many intelligent beings dispersed throughout the cosmos and that have a direct relationship with the material universe, unlike the multiplicity of angels, whose nature is purely spiritual.

We cannot assume that if these intelligent beings do exist, they have the same relationship with the trinity that we on earth have.

I do not believe that God needs to (or would want to) send Christ to suffer repeatedly to multiple places in the universe. I believe in one life, one death, and one resurrection of Christ, not in multiple lives (incarnations), deaths, and resurrections. Hebrews 10:10 refers to Christ’s sacrifice once for all.

There is nothing I read in the Bible that refers specifically to saving beings outside of earth. There is also nothing I read that refers to not saving such beings. This may be because men inspired by the Holy Spirit to tell stories important to humans on earth wrote the Bible at a certain point in time. God may have chosen not to include information on salvation outside of earth because it did not apply to us at the time the Word was captured. This leaves room for the possibility that if life outside earth needs salvation, that salvation is experienced by something other than Jesus Christ.

One version of Everett’s “many worlds” interpretation of quantum mechanics allows room for “an infinite number of ‘worlds’...only a few of or even just one of which has the right characteristics to support biological life.” If there are other worlds with biological life that has fallen, does that mean that God must re-create Adam and Eve, the serpent, the Garden of Eve, and the life, death, and resurrection of Christ in these other worlds? This seems impractical, if nothing else, and is similar to what Thomas Paine wrote in The Age of Reason (1793). Unlike Paine, I do not think that a belief in a Christian God and a belief in the existence of intelligent life outside our planet are incompatible. (Similarly, I am not conflicted between Christianity and evolution.)

According to scripture, God created the heavens and the earth. God is therefore the God of all heavens and earth. There are those who interpret text in the Book of Genesis as giving humans a preferred, superior status on earth. This interpretation calls for dominion to be dominance; for humans to be free to use the earth and its resources for human advantage. My interpretation is humans have a special, but not superior status. We are special because we are the only part of creation created by God’s breath. With this special status, we are given a special responsibility to be good stewards.

This anthropocentric view may make one believe that redemption from original sin only applies to humans on earth and cannot be used to redeem other life forms. Unfortunately, this view may also prevent us from recognizing life outside our planet because we may be looking for activities similar to what we do. It could then become a game; if this other life form recognizes this, it can disguise its activities so that we do not have any cues with which to recognize it.

What is ironic about this view is that the image of God in the Bible is universal and transcendent, not geocentric or anthropocentric. The Bible is clear about God’s omnipotence and rule over firmament and cosmos. Even if life elsewhere does not operate on the same father-children loving relationship as God does with us, this does not negate the universality of this concept for us.

Some who believe in the superiority of humans in a hierarchy of creation also believe this means humans must be the only intelligent life in the universe. (If there is life “out there,” it must look at some of the things we do “down here” and laugh hysterically at this notion.) By studying science, we discover that we (humans) have not been in the universe very long, relatively speaking, leaving us a short period of time to be discovered. The technological advances that may one day allow us to both discover and understand life outside earth is also very new. Corey writes “there hasn’t been time for any causal communication between areas of the universe that are separated by more than 30 degrees in the sky.”

I believe nothing is impossible for God, so if God wants to either place life outside of earth or let it develop outside earth, God may do so. (Just as God could send a savior anywhere God would like to.) If life was found outside earth and we were able to communicate with this life, I would like to ask whether this life knows about its creator. If this life knows its creator but does not describe it in a way that sounds like God, I would attribute that to God meeting these creatures where they are. I would also remind myself that no one can know God, so it should not surprise me that the description of their creator and my description of my creator do not sound alike. I would feel unafraid to share the story of my Christian faith and what God did on our planet earth, and would ask what God has done in their part of the universe.

Paul Davies, in Are We Alone?, writes about a religious component in our search for life outside our planet that motivates us to meet “the other.”

The powerful theme of alien beings acting as a conduit to the Ultimate—whether it appears in fiction or as a seriously intended cosmological theory—touches a deep chord in the human psyche. The attraction seems to be that by contacting superior beings in the sky, humans will be given access to privileged knowledge, and that the resulting broadening of our horizons will in some sense bring us a step closer to God. The search for alien beings can thus be seen as part of a long-standing religious quest as well as a scientific project.

I chose this topic because I am still building my own theology and thought it would help clarify some areas in which I was still not sure, such as original sin. In reading several scientific and philosophical books, it occurred to me that it may be time to give science fiction another chance. I have not tried to read it for many years, and I think my new theological outlook on life may make it more captivating to me. In many respects, trying to answer the topic of this question has raised more questions for me than it has answered, which seems typical of my seminary experience.