{"id":8090,"date":"2011-10-04T17:50:50","date_gmt":"2011-10-04T21:50:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/news\/?p=8090"},"modified":"2011-10-04T17:50:50","modified_gmt":"2011-10-04T21:50:50","slug":"did-jesus-also-die-for-martians-and-klingons","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/news\/2011\/10\/did-jesus-also-die-for-martians-and-klingons","title":{"rendered":"Did Jesus also die for Martians and Klingons?"},"content":{"rendered":"

What is\u00a0the Christian\u00a0missionary responsibility if\u00a0life is discovered on other planets?\u00a0\u00a0Does the Great Commission call\u00a0followers of Jesus\u00a0to evangelize Alpha Centauri?<\/p>\n

After all, John 3:16 says that God “so loved the world …” — not the worlds.<\/em> Or moons.<\/p>\n

In a speech titled “Did Jesus die for Klingons too?” German academic Christian Weidemann recently told attendees at\u00a0a U.S. government-funded conference on space travel that discovery of other worldly life could raise some difficult questions.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0Orlando, Florida,\u00a0event was billed as “The\u00a0100-Year Starship Symposium.”<\/p>\n

“Weidemann, a professor at the Ruhr-University Bochum, said that the death of Christ, some 2,000 years ago, was designed to save all creation, writes Gavin Allen in the British newspaper the Daily Mail<\/a><\/em>:<\/p>\n

However, the whole of creation, as defined by scientists, includes 125billion galaxies with hundreds of billions of stars in each galaxy.<\/p>\n

That means that if intelligent life exists on other planets, then Jesus or God would have to have visited them too, and sacrificed himself equally for Martian-kind as well as mankind.<\/p>\n

The alternative, posits Weidemann, is that Jesus chose earthlings as the single race to save and abandoned every other life form in the galaxy.<\/p>\n

Or, it could have been because humans were the only race who had sinned and required ‘saving’, said Weidemann, who added: ‘You can grasp the conflict.’<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What is\u00a0the Christian\u00a0missionary responsibility if\u00a0life is discovered on other planets?\u00a0\u00a0Does the Great Commission call\u00a0followers of Jesus\u00a0to evangelize Alpha Centauri? After all, John 3:16 says that God “so loved the world …” — not the worlds. Or moons. 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