judge

Why do you think his "coming" would mean a physical return to earth?

Barbarian

Biblically it makes no sense. If people who never heard the gospel are not going to hell for sinning, then telling them about the gospel is extreme cruelty. If those who never heard the gospel go to hell, then the idea of a just god goes there too.

I think this is better explained by armchair psychology. A believer needs reinforcement of his beliefs but needs even more the reinforcement of the importance of those beliefs. The bible describes devout believers and aggressive disbelievers; there is no recipe for dealing with the uninterested, who are nonetheless the biggest problem. Active disbelief can be reinterpreted as a way of believing but denying it; passive disbelief can only be interpreted to mean that the guy really does not think that Christianity is true. (If I sided with Eric Berne, I would say that the believer-strong atheist relationship is Parent-Child in both directions, while believer-weak atheist is Child-Parent from the side of the believer, and that hurts.) Therefore believers felt the need to force everyone taking a stance wrt. the truth of Christianity, and this got coded into the canon.

sub_zer0

Well you got so caught up in your skepticness you forgot the context, silly...

Johnny Skeptic

Just please tell us what good the Gospel message did for hundreds of millions of people who died without ever having heard it, and since they didn't hear it, why is it important that anyone ever heard it?