By Brother André Marie (from https://catholicism.org/ )
FATHER Thomas Crean, O.P., Dr. Alan Fimister, and Dr. John Joy have authored a twenty-five-page scholarly article, written in the scholastic format, in the pages of the theological journal, Divinitas. Called “Can a Person Be Justified by ‘Implicit Faith in Christ’?,” the article is available for purchase as a download from the Divinitas website (at $4.28, it’s a bargain).
The article’s abstract gives the scope of the work of these three scholars:
In this article the question is treated whether explicit faith in Christ is necessary for justification. The introduction specifies the state of the question, lays out the thesis that is being defended, and gives the reasons for the scholastic format of the article. The objections are then stated. The arguments stem from both speculative and positive theology involving all possible sources: Scripture, Magisterium, Church Fathers, etc. The respondeo affirms explicit faith in Christ as a necessity of means for justification, insisting on the gratuity and supernaturality of salvation. The contrary opinions of some later theologians are then briefly exposed. Lastly the objections are each answered individually.
The authors opted to use the scholastic format, first stating the objections to their thesis (eighteen of them!), then a sed contra (“on the contrary”), then the detailed development of their own thesis, followed by answers to the objections. All this is in the fashion of Saint Thomas Aquinas and other mediaeval scholastic theologians. Crean, Fimister, and Joy adopt this method not as an exercise in creative anachronism, but, as they say, in order to separate their own positive statement of the thesis they are upholding from their replies to objections against it.
The thesis they are defending is that explicit faith in Christ is necessary by a necessity of means in order to be justified. Stated negatively, the authors are saying that “implicit faith” in Christ — which they explain is something of a problematic formulation — does not suffice for justification. If it does not suffice for justification, then it does not, eo ipso, suffice for salvation.
It is important at the outset to explain the distinction between explicit and implicit as these terms are used in this context.
The words explicit and implicit derive from Latin words meaning, literally, “folded out,” and “folded in.” That which is explicit is open to the understanding, fully conscious, not obscure or ambiguous. Theologically, to believe something explicitly it to have a conscious, fully aware, clear, and direct belief in an article of faith. To believe something implicitly is to lack that consciousness, awareness, clarity, and direct quality of belief; but it is to believe the article nonetheless because, while not rejecting it, one assents in principle to the authority revealing it, and to other explicitly held articles of faith in which the article in question may be said to be implicit. An example will help: If a young Catholic believes in the articles of the Creed and the teaching of his catechism but is unaware, say, of the condemnations of the Monothelite heresy, the true doctrine of Christ’s full humanity[1. Specifically, in this case, faith in the two “wills and operations” — human and divine — of our Savior.] is said to be implicit in that person’s faith in the other Christian mysteries.
The problem with the formulation “implicit faith in Christ” is this: The principal mysteries of Christianity are the Trinity and the Incarnation. Now, faith in the other Christian mysteries can be implicit in these primary articles — as in the above case of our young Catholic. But there is no article of supernatural faith in which belief in these primary articles can be said to be implicit. The only way one might validly speak of “implicit faith in Christ” is in reference to the dispensation of the Old Testament; in that economy, the Israelite faithful (or even righteous non-Israelites, like Job) had implicit faith in Jesus of Nazareth because they believed in the Savior to come. Such faith came from supernatural revelation and was the result of the operation of interior grace.
Simply put, since the Passion, there is nothing in which faith in Christ can be said to be implicit. In the current dispensation, to believe in a savior yet to come is to deny that He has come — which is to deny Christ. One cannot have implicit faith in the Christ one explicitly denies.
One of the real strengths of the piece by Father Crean and Doctors Fimister and Joy is its clear defense of the gratuity and supernaturality of justification. God does not have to save everyone, or even give everyone the same opportunities for salvation. Salvation is a gratuitous — that is, free — gift. As a supernaturally revealed article of faith, belief in Jesus Christ, true God and true Man, cannot be implicit in mere monotheism, which is a doctrine one can arrive at by the unaided use of human reason, as we are assured by Vatican I. Nor, for that matter, can belief in the Trinity be implicit in monotheism. (Let’s not forget that the other two other Abrahamic monotheisms explicitly reject the Trinity and the Incarnation.)
The authors go beyond saying that explicit faith is necessary for justification. With exacting precision, they state that that it is necessary by a necessity of means. This strengthens their assertion by ruling out a mere “necessity of precept” — i.e., a command or law from which one might be legitimately excused — and stating that it an absolute sine qua non, without which justification is simply not possible.
What they are defending is, in short, the traditional doctrine. Here is how they state it:
During the first fifteen centuries of Christian history there was a consensus amongst Christians that explicit, conscious faith in Jesus Christ was necessary, after the time of our Lord’s passion, in order for anyone who had attained the use of reason to be justified. Beginning in the sixteenth century, some theologians began defending the opposing opinion that ‘implicit faith’ in Christ can be sufficient for those who are invincibly ignorant of the gospel to be justified. Since then this has become an increasingly common opinion, such that many now seem to take it for granted as if it were a part of Catholic teaching. Our purpose in this article is to show not only that Catholics may continue to hold the traditional thesis, but that it is in fact necessary for them to do so.
The Divinitas authors acknowledge that they are disagreeing with many theologians, including influential ones (on which more later). One of these is the only American priest I am aware of to be created cardinal because of his accomplishments as a theologian:
Cardinal Avery Dulles, S.J., who opposes our thesis, admits that “writers of the high patristic age considered that, in the Christian era, Christians alone could be saved. In the East, this view is represented by Gregory of Nyssa and John Chrysostom… . In the West, following Ambrose and others, Augustine taught that, because faith comes by hearing, those who had never heard the gospel would be denied salvation. They would be eternally punished for original sin as well as for any personal sins they had committed… . The views of Augustine and Fulgentius remained dominant in the Christian West throughout the Middle Ages” until “a major theological development occurred in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries”; Dulles, “Who Can Be Saved?,” First Things (February 2008). This “major development” is in fact a contradiction of what came before. [Emphasis mine.]
I do love the bluntness of that last sentence.
When considering the notion of the development of doctrine, it is the unstated assumption of many theologians — those of the more “progressive” sort — that development moves only in one direction, that of an ever broader, more latitudinarian, or liberal understanding. We see this in moral theology, where it is understood by thinkers like John T. Noonan, Jr. that there has been a development beyond the traditional doctrine forbidding the sin of birth control, according to which development, Catholics may now engage in behavior that was always forbidden to Christians. We see the phenomenon in other moral matters as well (e.g., usury), but also in matters of faith, such as those that pertain to the nature of the Church and the sacraments (e.g., the exclusive identity of the one true Chruch of Christ with the Catholic Church, the male-only priesthood, Holy Communion being permitted to unrepentant adulterers). But this ever more permissive or broadened idea is not the concept of doctrinal development given to us by the fundamentally conservative and deeply traditional Saint Vincent of Lérins. In short, the “progress” spoken of by Saint Vincent was a homogeneous progress of deeper understanding of the sacred deposit, not a heterogeneous evolution of dogma.
Speaking of which, it is often said that, if someone does not believe the faith explicitly, God will count the man’s willingness to believe it had he had such a chance as the equivalent of explicit belief. Here is how Crean, Fimister, and Joy answer this:
Justification could not, however, have been achieved even in those early times [of the Old Testament] simply by a readiness to believe a revelation if it should turn out that God had made one. The readiness to believe God is a duty under natural law, knowable by natural reason, in any possible order of providence. Man cannot be divinised by accomplishing duties under natural law, or else the beatific vision would be the end due to his nature. To claim that supernatural beatitude may be attained simply by a readiness to assent to a revelation would thus be, in a way, to repeat the sin of the fallen angels, who fell not by their unwillingness to become blessed, but because they would not receive beatitude as something gratuitous.
Once God has established the means of salvation, man accepts God’s offer of friendship and heavenly happiness by accepting this means. One cannot now accept this offer by believing that God will appoint some means of salvation in the future, since this would be to believe something false. We cannot be justified by a false belief; nor is it possible to accept an offer that has not been made to us. It belongs to the very meaning of the word ‘accept’ that something has, in fact, been offered. Hence, if God offers to us a future means of salvation, we cannot accept this by taking something present as the means to be saved; and if he is offering us a present one, we cannot accept it by believing that he will make one available in the future. [Emphasis mine.]
In a footnote, the authors bolster their own argumentation by an argument from authority:
Pope Leo XIII wrote in Tametsi futura prospicientibus: ‘Not but that man is able by the right use of reason to know and to obey certain principles of the natural law. But though he should know them all and keep them inviolate through life — and even this is impossible without the aid of the grace of our Redeemer — still it is vain for anyone without faith to promise himself eternal salvation. “If anyone abide not in Me, he shall be cast forth as a branch, and shall wither, and they shall gather him up and cast him into the fire, and he burneth” (John 15:6). “He that believeth not shall be condemned” (Mark 16:16).’
Earlier they had cited Saint Thomas to this effect:
“...natural knowledge cannot reach God as the object of heavenly bliss, which is the aspect under which hope and charity tend towards him” [STh 2a 2ae 4, 7]
And elsewhere they invoke the authority of Pope Innocent XI:
Pope Innocent XI condemned the proposition that the faith necessary for justification could be something ‘resting on the testimony of a creature or some similar thing’ (as opposed to the testimony of God); DH 2123. [The proposition Innocent XI condemned (in 1679) reads thus in full: “A faith amply indicated from the testimony of creation, or from a similar motive, suffices for justification.”]
Note that Popes Leo and Innocent wrote after the sixteenth century, when the novel theory had first been advanced. Yet, today, it is not unheard of that Catholics will say that observing the natural law is sufficient for salvation for one invincibly ignorant of the Gospel. A friend recently informed me that his pastor told him just that — and this priest offers the Traditional Latin Mass! To say this categorically denies the supernaturality of justification and, consequently, of salvation. (The natural law is, as the name suggests, natural, not supernatural!)
The authors are unsparing in their criticisms of celebrated notables, including many theologians from the sixteenth century on (but Saint Robert Bellarmine, whom they call, “the greatest of all Jesuit theologians,” was one of the good guys!). I already mentioned their simultaneous quotation from and disagreement with Cardinal Dulles. They similarly appeal to the argumentation of Pope Benedict XVI, who did not hold their thesis, but who eloquently pointed out the serious problems that result from denying it — problems causing what Ratzinger called a “deep double crisis.” Crean, Fimister, and Joy take Jesuits old and new to task (Francisco Suarez and Juan de Lugo of old, and, more recently, Francis Sullivan), and dig fairly heavily into the Society of Jesus in general, at one point calling the novel theory, “the Jesuit position.” But Father Crean, O.P., did not allow a spirit of Dominican chauvinism to keep the team of authors from criticizing his fellow Friars Preachers, Melchior Cano (1509–1560) and Domingo Soto (1494–1560).
Back to the Jesuits: the article quotes Father Francis Sullivan, S.J., forthrightly stating in his own book that this novel position on the sufficiency of implicit faith in Christ — which he himself advocated — “was a departure from the teaching of St. Thomas and the whole mediaeval tradition, which had required explicit Christian faith for the salvation of everyone in the Christian era.”
As with his fellow Jesuit, Cardinal Dulles, so too with Sullivan: This is what the Fathers and the mediaevals held — but, you know, development happened!
Crean, Fimister, and Joy wrote, as I said, in the scholastic format; properly speaking, therefore, their work is principally one of speculative theology. In advancing their thesis, these theologians engage in the same kind of rational argumentation from premises to conclusions that the mediaeval scholastics used (and that is the method of scholastic, or speculative theology), but they also engage in positive theology by making many appeals to authority — of the Scriptures, the Magisterium, the Fathers and Doctors of the Church. I would like to close by citing only three of their appeals to authority, which it is refreshing to see cited in this context:
- ‘When we do all that is in our power, in matters where we lack knowledge, God will give us his hand; but if we do not do what we can, we do not enjoy God’s help either… . So do not say: “How is it that God has neglected that sincere and honest pagan?” You will find that he has not really been diligent in seeking the truth, since what concerns the truth is now clearer than the sun’. — Saint John Chrysostom, In Epist. ad Rom. Hom. 26:3–4.
- The Holy Office under Pope Clement XI decreed that dying adults must not be baptised until they are instructed ‘about all matters that are necessary, by a necessity of means’ for salvation, and ‘principally, the mysteries of the Trinity and the incarnation’. — Reply of the Holy Office to the Bishop of Quebec, 1703; DH 2380. [Our own Brother Thomas Mary Sennott cites this at length in “The Salvation of the Pre-Columbian Amerindians.”]
- Pope St. Pius X states in his encyclical Acerbo nimis: ‘We declare that a great number of those who are condemned to eternal punishment suffer that everlasting calamity because of ignorance of those mysteries of faith which must be known and believed in order to be numbered among the elect’. (In a footnote, the authors point out, “He was quoting from Cardinal Prospero Lambertini (the future Benedict XIV), Institutiones Ecclesiasticae, inst. XXVII (Venice, 1750), p. 74).
(See “Doctrinal Summary” on this site for further arguments from authority on the necessity of explicit faith.)
Please do yourself a favor and invest the $4.28 it costs to get this 25-page article. Anyone who craves a deeper, more theological study of the question should have it.
