Did Jesus Die for Klingons?

This might seem a strange question to ask, yet they are asking it at the 100 year Starship Symposium. To be more precise in an address to the symposium Professor Christian Weideman discussed the possible implications of discovering extraterrestrial life on the world’s religions, especially Christianity. Here is the story in the Daily Mail.

A Christian professor has told a U.S. Government-backed conference on space travel that the discovery of aliens would lead to significant problems for his own religion.

In a speech entitled ‘Did Jesus die for Klingons too?’, German academic Christian Weidemann outlined the possible ramifications that the ultimate space discovery would engender.

Speaking at the 100 Year Starship Symposium in Orlando Florida, Professor Weidemann also attempted to outline how the inevitable theological conflict might be resolved.

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.

However, the whole of creation, as defined by scientists, includes 125 billion galaxies with hundreds of billions of stars in each galaxy.

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.

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

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.’

‘If there are extra-terrestrial intelligent beings at all, it is safe to assume that most of them are sinners too,’ he said, according to Space.com.

However, the conflict of theology would be more of a problem for Christians than it would for other religions.

Hindus believe in multiple gods, and would therefore not have an issue with Weidemann’s suggestion about multiple incarnations of God, and in the Muslim world Muhammad was not God incarnate, simple a prophet, which would also allow for the ‘multiple God theory’.

To be honest, I really don’t see why this would be a problem for Christians in particular. I have always taken it for granted that there are intelligent extraterrestrials out there. I simply cannot imagine that God would create this huge universe all for the benefit of the inhabitants of one planet.

In fact, C. S. Lewis has already explored the theological implications in his Space Trilogy. In these books, the protagonist Ransom travels to Mars and Venus. He discovers that Earth is fallen and therefore cut off from the rest of the universe, hence the “Silent Planet. Mars is inhabited by a race of angel-like creatures while Venus is still in an edenic period since its inhabitants have never fallen.

Lewis also dealt with the matter in the Chronicles of Narnia. As he explained, Aslan is not an allegory of Jesus. He is Jesus, as he might appear in a world of talking animals. In our world, he took the form of a man. In Narnia he is a lion.

So, did Jesus die for the Klingons? I really couldn’t say, having never met any Klingons. I would speculate that either other intelligent races have never fallen, and therefore be without sin, or they have fallen and God has made provision for their atonement in a manner appropriate to each race.

Related articles

• Are Aliens Part of God’s Plan, Too? Finding E.T. Could Change Religion Forever (space.com)
• Are Aliens Part of God’s Plan, Too? Finding E.T. Could Change Religion Forever (livescience.com)
• 100 Year Starship Symposium (longnow.org)