Recently, I heard a member of a professed Christian church who had been asked to pray at an LDS religious assembly explain her church’s approach to prayer before offering the requested invocation. She explained that while the members of her faith were known in this world as individuals, they pray as a community, that is, they recite a common prayer in unison given that they believe that they are saved in community. Undoubtedly, if she or just about any other participant in one of today’s professed Christian churches were to be asked concerning the future eternal condition of those who are not members of their “community,” the answer would almost certainly be something to the effect that “they are lost.” The beliefs that God’s children are saved in “community” and that those who die without the opportunity to avail themselves of the gospel of Jesus Christ while in mortality are “lost” to their Heavenly Father are indelible marks of the lingering apostasy from the Lord’s true gospel.
Paul while writing to the Philippians may have well said it best. “Wherefore, my beloved, as ye have always obeyed, not as in my presence only, but now much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling” (Philippians 2:12). The prophet Nephi’s words confirm this truth. “For we labor diligently to write, to persuade our children, and also our brethren, to believe in Christ, and to be reconciled to God; for we know that it is by grace that we are saved, after all we can do” (2 Nephi 25:23). The realizing of salvation is very much a personal, an individual matter. Salvation is not a singular condition that one receives or loses in some grand totality. The conditions or degrees of salvation that God’s children will inherit after the resurrection are many. They will span the breadth of the three great kingdoms of glory to which most of us will be assigned following the final judgment. At that day, we will stand before the “judgment bar” as individuals and not in community to be judged according to our individual faithfulness in living the gospel during our stay in mortality (2 Nephi 33:10-15).
But what about all of God’s spirit children who never had the opportunity to hear and accept the Lord’s gospel during their mortal probation? Are they just “lost”? The answer to that question will certainly vary depending upon the party answering. The only possible answer worth consideration here, however, is the correct one. God would be an unjust God and thus would cease to be God in fact if He were to deny any of His children the opportunity to exercise their agency in choosing the quality of their eventual and eternal existence.
Peter awakens our thoughts as to how this end is accomplished. “For Christ also hath once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh, but quickened by the Spirit: By which also he went and preached unto the spirits in prison; Which sometime were disobedient, when once the longsuffering of God waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was a preparing, wherein few, that is, eight souls were saved by water” (1 Peter 3:18-20). “For for this cause was the gospel preached also to them that are dead, that they might be judged according to men in the flesh, but live according to God in the spirit” (1 Peter 4:6). Through modern-day revelation, we understand that Christ did not go personally to the wicked. “[A]nd among the ungodly and the unrepentant who had defiled themselves while in the flesh, his voice was not raised;” during the space of the three days in which his body lay in the tomb (Doctrine and Covenants 138:20 and following). The Lord used this short space of time to visit the righteous dead announcing to them a message of gladness concerning their imminent resurrection.
Also during these three days, He organized the beginnings of the missionary effort among the wicked. Commencing then and continuing through the Millennium, missionaries from among the Saints of God in paradise are sent to the spirits of God’s children in prison to teach the willing the gospel of Jesus Christ. If they accept the message and the saving ordinances that have been performed in their behalf by living proxies upon the earth, then they are moved to paradise to await their resurrection among the righteous. Joseph Smith taught this truth plainly. “. . . Every man that has been baptized and belongs to the kingdom has a right to be baptized for those who have gone before; and as soon as the law of the Gospel is obeyed here by their friends who act as proxy for them, the Lord has administrators there to set them free” (Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, 367).
Thus those who are “lost” to God, that is, fail to return to His presence are those who consciously rejected the Lord’s gospel at some point in their existence, the gospel being the only means by which mankind may be saved. The earthly faithful and the repentant dead will be saved through their “obedience to the laws and ordinances of the Gospel.” Our third Article of Faith reads: “We believe that through the Atonement of Christ, all mankind may be saved, by obedience to the laws and ordinances of the Gospel.”
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