Missionary hubris: Between 1 AD and 1776 over 40 billion people have come and gone in the world, most of whom never heard the gospel even once

That's the inescapable conclusion one reaches from the (admittedly speculative) data assembled by Carl Haub, senior visiting scholar at the Population Reference Bureau, in "How Many People Have Ever Lived on Earth?"

The answer he gives to that question is about 108 billion, in response to the familiar assertion made "some time back in the 1970s . . . that 75 percent of the people who had ever been born were alive at that moment." He calculates, however, that only 6.5% of those ever born were alive in 2011.

This means that just since the American Revolutionary Era, the worldwide gospel mission has been a phenomenon reaching, or intending to reach, only the roughly 18 billion who have come and gone since then. If billions who have never heard and/or do not believe now are "lost", literally tens of billions were already lost before.

Hell must be teeming, and heaven a lonely place.

For which of you, intending to build a tower, sitteth not down first, and counteth the cost, whether he have sufficient to finish it? Lest haply, after he hath laid the foundation, and is not able to finish it, all that behold it begin to mock him, Saying, This man began to build, and was not able to finish. -- Luke 14:28ff.