Last-Minute Conversion?

The death of a long-time comic strip author can challenge us to consider what it truly means to follow Jesus.  Days before his death, he wrote a short statement in which he announced that he accepted Jesus as His Lord and Savior.  Those words spell out a change of heart, but other words in the statement seemed to contradict that.  In dealing with salvation, we can be confident in the two principles found in Romans 10 (ESV):
(8) “The word is near you, in your mouth and in your heart” (that is, the word of faith that we proclaim);
9 because, if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.
10 For with the heart one believes and is justified, and with the mouth one confesses and is saved.

The two components for salvation are heart belief and confession of the mouth.  The Bible gives us assurance that if that decision has been made in the heart and spoke through the mouth, then a person is saved.

Scott Adams is the long-time author of the "Dilbert" comic strip.  It was described by CBN.com as "making light of the absurdities of office life."  It was in some 2000 newspapers, but as his comics became more controversial and political, the strip was terminated from being a syndicated product.  So, "Dilbert" lived on online and Scott Adams became a force in social media.

He died recently as the result of prostate cancer at the age of 68.  Before he died, he had composed a statement of faith, of sorts, which was read by his ex-wife following his death. It said, in part, according to CBN:

Part of that sounds pretty straightforward to me.  But, what do you make of the phrase, "I'm not a believer," or a description of his decision as a "risk-reward calculation" that "looks so attractive to me."

Bethel McGrew, writing at WORLD Magazine, expressed her concerns about the language of the confession of Scott Adams.  She stated that in a January episode of his podcast, Coffee With Scott Adams:

He framed his choice in openly game-theoretic terms, as a “smart” risk-reward calculation that he hoped would please his Christian friends. If they were right, “I win,” and if not, nothing lost. By his understanding of the “dominant Christian theory,” he would wake up in heaven if he’d had a good life, and he felt confident on that score.

She had written, "Adams’ idiosyncratic deathbed conversion announcement has spawned a discourse more spiritual than political, reigniting age-old debates about Pascal’s Wager and the theology of Christian salvation."   Kody Cooper, a professor at the University of Tennessee and writer at the Word on Fire website, explored that point of view, writing;

I think the thing he should most be remembered for is this: At the end of his life, he took Pascal’s wager.

Adams had revealed that, while he was not hostile to religion, he was a religious skeptic. In this respect, he seemed to be something of an Andrew MacPhee in C. S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength, the resident skeptical rationalist and empiricist who doubted the supernatural aspects of Ransom’s mission but was a morally serious and intellectually curious person.
 
But in a striking video released not long before his death, he said that he planned to convert to Christianity. He laid out his reasoning thus: Christianity seemed to him the most-likely-to-be-true religion on offer. If it turned out that after death he had ceased to be (i.e., that mortalism and materialism are true, what might be called “naturalism”), then he would be no worse off for his Christian faith. But, if it turned out that Christ really did defeat death, and eternal life would be had with or apart from him, then he would end up with a much better outcome than if he had chosen unbelief.

Cooper says, "In the end, Scott Adams’s greatest wager was to place his faith in Jesus Christ."  McGrew goes on to say:

Christians are right to wish Adams had reached a true understanding of what saving faith really means—not just a string of words repeated like a protective incantation, but an embrace of Christ, the living Word. Whether we “lived a good life or not,” Christ alone saves. But as we leave Adams in God’s hands, the work of tending to other lonely souls still lies before us. May we be all the more motivated to remind the world what our faith uniquely has to offer—the great Story that echoes and reechoes through all our little stories. That is the myth that was actually true and the man who was actually God.

The question becomes, did Scott Adams really have heart belief?  Or was he simply making a transaction because he believed that Christianity was the most logical choice?  And, would possessing that perspective disqualify from a place in the Kingdom, in heaven, with Jesus?

I think it comes down to heart belief, and it's not our call to judge someone when he or she says they have made a decision for salvation.  Scott Adams made one last statement of faith.  Reminds me of a man hanging on the cross two thousand years ago who said to another man on a cross, "Remember me..."

The Adams conundrum can remind us that should always be evaluating the expression of our own salvation, to ascertain whether our lives are measuring up to what we say we believe.   And, as Bethel McGrew encourages us, regarding the souls of others, we should be more concerned with those who are living than those who have passed.