How would we apply theology to the idea of alien life?

It’s a a bit of a can of worms isn’t it? Professor Jim Bielby was floored by the question the first time he heard it.

“I was a professor for a year and I thought I had heard it all. I got this one and I’m scratching my head and thinking ‘Oh my goodness…’ Think of all the different questions that would come up, if we were to find life out there someplace.”

“Ironically there’s actually a discipline, a sub-discipline, called astrotheology, or sometimes it’s called Exo-theology. It’s devoted to how we think about theology in light of  extraterrestrial life.”

To even start unpacking this potential problem, Professor Bielby says we need to find the questions we should be asking.

“What if we were to get radio frequency from Andromeda or someplace and it was intelligent life? Now just think about that. You’d say ‘OK, well, God created them right?’

“But now you have this whole interesting thing where we ask what if evolution is the case, did they evolve independently of us? That raises the whole creation vs. evolution issue which itself is a mushroom cloud of controversy. So you have that first basic level of how this relates to God’s creation.”

But where it gets really, really interesting is if you talk about these intelligent creatures created the image of God. Potentially, did they sin? If they didn’t sin, well how come we’re so bad? If they did sin, does God desire to be in relationship with them? Is He going to die for their sin?

“But if he’s going to die for their sin, that means Jesus is dying twice right? If He’s not dying for their sin, there’s a whole bunch of intelligent creatures created in His image, that He doesn’t desire to be in relationship with!”

Are you overwhelmed with questions yet? Of course it’s all hypothetical, but stranger questions have been asked of us in recent years, so why shouldn’t we think about what this could mean.

“Anyway you approach this you’re stepping on landmines, theologically speaking. These are the questions and I think we have to make friends with the fact that there is a lot we are not going to know.”

“Fundamentally we need to reel it back and state what we DO know. There are a couple of things: First, if it’s created it’s from God.  Second, if anybody is saved it’s by Jesus. I think if we got a rewind back on those fundamental ideas, it can help these issues from becoming quite so paralyzing.”

In a culture of new surprises every day, we could very well be asking these questions non-hypothetically very soon.


Jim Bielby is a professor of Christian Theology at Bethel University, and has published numerous books on theological study and apologetics.

Astrotheology: Does Jesus save aliens? - Jim Bielby