Eternity in Their Hearts

Don Richardson argues that God has not only prepared the Christian gospel for all peoples but has also prepared all peoples for the gospel. Drawing on the epigraph from Ecclesiastes 3:11, which states that God "has also set eternity in the hearts of men," Richardson presents case studies from cultures across the globe to demonstrate that traces of monotheistic belief and anticipation of divine messengers exist within folk religions worldwide. The book is organized into two parts: Part One examines what Richardson calls the "Melchizedek Factor," or God's general revelation to humanity through culture, while Part Two traces the "Abraham Factor," the biblical mandate to bless "all peoples on earth" from the Abrahamic Covenant through the New Testament.

Part One opens with a dramatized account of a sixth-century B.C. plague in Athens. According to a tradition recorded by the Greek author Diogenes Laertius, the Athenians summoned a Cretan named Epimenides to appease an unknown god responsible for the plague. Epimenides released hungry sheep on Mars Hill at dawn; those that lay down instead of grazing were taken as signs of the unknown god's willingness to accept sacrifice. Altars inscribed agnosto theo ("to an unknown god") were built on each resting spot, and the plague lifted. Richardson connects this story to the apostle Paul's later visit to Athens as described in the New Testament book of Acts. Paul discovered one of these surviving altars and used it to present the gospel to Athenian philosophers, declaring that the God they worshiped as unknown, he would now proclaim.

Richardson turns to the biblical narrative of Abraham and Melchizedek to establish his conceptual framework. God's covenant with Abraham, as recorded in Genesis, contains a "top line" (personal blessing to Abraham and his descendants) and a "bottom line" (blessing to "all peoples on earth"). When Abraham arrived in Canaan, he encountered Melchizedek, king of Salem and priest of El Elyon ("God Most High"), a Canaanite who already worshiped the true God. Abraham accepted Melchizedek's name for God, paid him a tithe, and received his blessing. Richardson proposes that Melchizedek represents God's general revelation, older and more universal, while Abraham represents God's special, covenant-based revelation. A third figure appears in the narrative: Bera, king of Sodom, who offered Abraham spoils, which Abraham refused to avoid alliance with Sodom's corruption. Richardson calls this the "Sodom Factor," an occultish distortion within pagan cultures that must be distinguished from genuine traces of God's witness.

Richardson applies this framework to cultures worldwide. The Inca king Pachacuti, who ruled from A.D. 1438 to 1471, questioned the divinity of Inti, the sun, noting that the sun followed a fixed path and could be dimmed by a cloud. He convened a theological council and revived the nearly extinct concept of Viracocha, the omnipotent Creator, but limited Viracocha worship to the ruling caste. When Spanish conquistadores later destroyed the upper class, the reformation died with it. Among the Santal people of India, Norwegian missionary Lars Skrefsrud arrived in 1867 and found 2.5 million Santal electrified by his message. A sage named Kolean recounted oral traditions paralleling Genesis and told Skrefsrud the Santal already knew of Thakur Jiu, "the Genuine God." Skrefsrud accepted this as a valid name for God, and the familiar name evoked generations of longing; during one period, the mission averaged 80 baptisms per day. Additional examples include the Gedeo of Ethiopia, where a man named Warrasa Wange received visions of messengers from Magano, the Creator, eight years before Canadian missionaries arrived at the precise location he had seen, and the Mbaka of the Central African Republic, who believed Koro, the Creator, had sent His Son into the world. In China, ancient belief in Shang Ti (Lord of Heaven) predated Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism but was gradually restricted to the emperor alone. In Korea, Protestant missionaries arriving in 1884 adopted Hananim, the native Korean name for the supreme God, disarming hostility toward a foreign deity and contributing to explosive church growth.

Chapter 2 turns to peoples who believed their forefathers once possessed a sacred book from God that was subsequently lost. The Karen of Burma maintained hymns extolling Y'wa (the supreme God) and narratives paralleling Genesis, and their tradition predicted a "white brother" would restore the lost book. American Baptist missionary Adoniram Judson arrived in Burma in 1817, unaware that Karen people nearby sang hymns to Y'wa. A Karen man named Ko Thah-byu came to Judson's household, converted, and became the first to carry the gospel to his people, producing an explosive response. Karen Christians later sent missionaries to the Kachin, who also believed in a lost book, and within 90 years some 250,000 Kachin became Christians. Missionary William Marcus Young reached the Lahu, who anticipated a messenger bearing a lost "white book" from their Creator, Gui'Sha, and tens of thousands converted. Among the headhunting Wa, a prophet named Pu Chan saddled a pony and told disciples to follow it; the pony traveled roughly 200 miles to Young's mission compound. Similar patterns produced results among the Lisu of China and the Naga and Mizo peoples of India, where Nagaland and Mizoram boast the highest per capita ratios of baptized Christians of any areas of comparable size, at 90 and 87 percent respectively.

Chapter 3 examines customs within pagan cultures that parallel biblical concepts. Richardson draws on his experience among the Sawi people of New Guinea, whose custom of offering a living child as a "Peace Child" to secure peace provided an analogy for presenting Jesus as God's ultimate Peace Child. He also describes Dyak ceremonies in Borneo involving a miniature boat that symbolically bears away the people's sin, paralleling the Hebrew scapegoat ritual, and an Asmat peace-making ceremony in which children pass through a passage formed by reclining fathers and standing mothers, giving them a framework for understanding Jesus' teaching about being "born again."

Chapter 4 traces academic theories about religion's origins. English anthropologist Edward B. Tylor proposed in 1871 that religion evolved from animism (spirit worship) to polytheism to monotheism. Scottish scholar Andrew Lang and Austrian Catholic priest Wilhelm Schmidt later documented widespread monotheistic belief among the world's most primitive peoples, effectively refuting Tylor. Richardson argues that Tylor's discredited theory nonetheless exerted broad influence: The Protestant theologian Julius Wellhausen built his Higher Criticism of the Bible—a school of biblical scholarship that questioned the traditional origins of Scripture—upon it, the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche extended its evolutionary logic to argue for racial supremacy, and Communist regimes used it to justify anti-religious policy.

Part Two shifts to the "Abraham Factor." Richardson, drawing on missiologist Ralph Winter, argues that the covenant's "bottom line," the promise to bless all peoples, is the central theme of the Bible from Genesis 12 onward. The apostle Paul explicitly links the covenant to the New Testament gospel, calling the inclusion of Gentiles (non-Jews) a mystery revealed to him. Richardson demonstrates that Jesus consistently manifested an "all-peoples perspective" throughout His ministry: He healed Gentiles, praised a Roman centurion's faith above any in Israel, told the Good Samaritan parable, and cleansed the Temple's court of the Gentiles. At Nazareth, Jesus cited examples of God bypassing needy Jews to bless Gentiles, provoking the congregation to attempt to kill Him. The Great Commission—Jesus' final command to make disciples of all nations—Richardson argues, was the culmination of sustained preparation, not an afterthought.

The final chapter contends that Acts records the apostles' reluctance to obey the Great Commission more than their compliance. Despite the Holy Spirit's outpouring at Pentecost, the feast when Acts depicts the Spirit descending on the early church in Gentile languages, the apostles remained in Jerusalem. God scattered Christians through persecution, and a layman named Philip broke into Samaria and evangelized an Ethiopian eunuch. Peter, one of Jesus' foremost apostles, required a thrice-repeated vision before visiting the household of a Gentile named Cornelius. Paul, commissioned directly by Jesus, developed the policy that Gentile converts could form their own churches without submitting to Jewish ceremonial law. The Jerusalem Council, a formal gathering of apostles and church elders convened to settle that question, formally affirmed this approach, and traditions suggest the apostles eventually dispersed across the known world. Richardson concludes that Christians today can bring God's 4,000-year-old promise to fruition by representing the Abraham Factor, acknowledging the Melchizedek Factor, and rejecting the Sodom Factor.