Karlo Broussard, author of The New Relativism, answers a caller who asks if people who never knew about Jesus have the chance to be saved.
Transcript:
I have a question: “How can a person who never knew Jesus Christ get to heaven?”
Well, one way in which that could take place is if God sends a prophet to miraculously be present to that person who never knew Jesus and proclaim Jesus to that person, and that person know Jesus right before death, accept Jesus, and go to heaven. Another way would be for God, by way of a miracle and divine power, to infuse knowledge within the mind of that person who never knew Jesus, to know about Jesus and be able to make a choice whether to follow Jesus or not. And if follow Jesus, believe in Jesus, ascend to Jesus, and die in that belief and friendship with Jesus, then heaven would be His.
Or another way would be in some mysterious way that we do not know, whereby God is able to give the grace of salvation to someone who is not responsible for his or her ignorance of Jesus Christ. For that person, if that person is come honestly seeking truth in the ways that he or she knows how, and is living in accord with that truth according to the capabilities that they have, responding to whatever temporary helps God is giving that person, even though that person doesn’t have explicit knowledge of Jesus Christ, it is possible that God can communicate the grace of salvation to that person. Because ultimately, Tom, God knows whether that person in the heart of hearts, whether that person is fundamentally oriented towards truth, if oriented towards truth and goodness, then ultimately oriented towards God himself. And if that is the case, and that person has not made any positive act of the will at the moment of death to oppose truth or goodness, as he or she knows truth and goodness, then that person is not positively opposed to God, not positively rejecting God in any way. And so God could possibly communicate the graces of salvation to that person, knowing the inner movements of the heart and the mind, and whether the heart and the mind is ultimately ordered to him who is truth and goodness itself. And so these would be some ways, possible ways, in which a person who never knew about Jesus could actually go to heaven.
And keep in mind this, lest there be any confusion, whatever grace that person is saved by, the grace that would perfect the soul and give it, you know, the grace that would make it rightly ordered to God as its supernatural end, that grace would come from Jesus Christ and no other. Since our Lord has said in John 14.6, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.”