I have already mentioned, while introducing this theme, the Council of Florence’s
solemn teaching as one of the foundations of my position. Some others are as follows.
Sacred Scripture.
It needs to be acknowledged that while the overall impression we receive from the
canonical gospels, epistles, and the Acts of the Apostles is that an
ECNS (extra Christianismum nulla salus--Outside of Christianity there is No Salvation)assumption underlies the teaching of these inspired writings, such a position is nowhere spelled out unequivocally. Of course, the necessity of faith in Jesus for salvation is clearly taught in the New Testament: “justification by faith” is, after all, notoriously one of the central themes in St. Paul’s letters. But the question that interests us at present - whether or not that faith always needs to be explicit and conscious - is nowhere expressly dealt with.
From whence, then, comes that aforesaid “overall impression” that an ECNS position underlies the N.T. teaching? The answer, I suggest, is twofold.
First, when we talk about “belief” in something or someone, we nearly always mean explicit, conscious belief unless otherwise stated, or unless the discussion happens to be precisely about the “implicit” vs. “explicit” problem.(4) There seems no reason to think that the New Testament represents an exception to this hermeneutical generalization.
Secondly, Scripture insinuates or suggests by what it omits, not only by what it says. And the silence of the N.T. seems rather eloquent on this point. When, for instance, Jesus bluntly asserts, “No one comes to the Father except through me” (Jn 14:6), without immediately adding (as most modern commentators would do) that this doesn’t necessarily mean an explicit belief in himself is always required, the impression is left that it always is required.
A stronger biblical text supporting ECNS is the Lord’s assertion, “This is eternallife: to know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent” (Jn 17: 3). Our Lord’s verb “know” - the Greek ginosko, meaning intimate, personal knowledge -surely means conscious, explicit awareness. (What else do we ever mean when speak of “knowing” something or someone?) So, given the Johannine usage of the term “eternal life”, (5) the natural sense of Jesus’ words is that to be in the state of grace in this present,earthly life means (that is, necessarily involves) consciously knowing and believing in him. And if we read through Acts of the Apostles and the N.T. letters, the constant impression we naturally receive is that the preaching of the Gospel to those who do not yet “know” Jesus is urgently necessary in order for them to be saved.
Once the assumption is widely diffused that untold numbers of Jews, pagans and unbelievers out there are already in the state of grace by virtue of their “implicit faith”, and so are heading straight for heaven, then that sense of urgency in spreading the Gospel is inevitably weakened very seriously.
This of course is what we have seen over the last forty years: a large-scale decline of authentic, conversion-oriented, Catholic missionary activity around the world, in spite of major documents from Vatican II (Ad Gentes) and John Paul II (Redemptoris Missio) attempting to boost and justify such activity.
If Saints Peter and Paul had believed that devout Jews could still be saved by
living and worshipping the way they did prior to Pentecost – simply believing in God as a remunerator of good and evil (Heb. 11: 6) and striving to keep his law – could we really imagine these apostles talking to the “men of Israel” the way they do in fact talk? At Pentecost, Peter declares to such devout Jewish pilgrims, when they ask what they are to do, “Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins” (Acts 2: 38). And to the Sanhedrin, “He [Jesus] is the stone rejected by you, the builders, which has become the cornerstone. There is no salvation through anyone else, nor is there any other name under heaven given the human race by which we are to be saved” (Acts 4: 11-12). Admittedly, these affirmations are being made to those have already heard, or are simultaneously hearing, the proclamation of Jesus as Lord and Savior, so they do not prove that those still in invincible ignorance of the Gospel cannot be saved without coming to an explicit faith in him.
Nevertheless, the wording of the second of those texts in particular, with its emphasis on “no other name under heaven”, suggests quite strongly the requirement of explicit faith; for it seems to insinuate that if you don’t worship Jesus Christ by name, that is, consciously, you won’t be saved. In other words, it insinuates that those all over the rest of the earth (“under heaven”) worshipping innumerable deities with other “names” have not received justification and sanctifying grace, even though their ignorance of Jesus is still invincible. (We know it was still invincible because in Acts, chapter 4, Peter is speaking in the very early days after Pentecost, before the infant Church has even begun to move out of Jerusalem to begin evangelizing the gentiles and the Jews of the diaspora.)
Also, the very fact that such blunt affirmations as St. Peter’s are certainly not being made by most Catholic leaders today strongly suggests that the post-Vatican II Church has, at least in practice, moved away from the original apostolic approach. For if you believe – as most of our prelates and theologians do today – that sincere and decently-living Jews already have the kind of implicit or unconscious “faith” in Christ that can be salvific for them, you will never speak to a Jewish audience as bluntly as Peter did, or as Paul did in answering the jailer’s question as to what he must do to be saved: “Believe in the Lord Jesus and you and your household will be saved” (Acts 16:31). No, you will be far more nuanced and ‘ecumenically correct’, saying something like this:
“We Christians believe Jesus is the Savior of all men, and if you become convinced of that, then you should, logically, become a Christian. But if you remain sincerely unconvinced that Jesus is the Messiah, then of course your present Jewish convictions will be accepted by God as saving faith for you. But we believe it will actually be Jesus who saves you, even if you don’t have any conscious and explicit recognition of him as the Savior.”
Now, there is really nothing that remotely sounds like that in any N.T. account of the apostles’ preaching to their own people. On the contrary, St. Paul sees their state of being “sincerely unconvinced” regarding Jesus’ divinity as a kind of blindness, a dullness of mind. He says that, “to this present day a veil (over their hearts) remains unlifted when they read the old covenant, because through Christ it is taken away. . . . [W]henever a person turns to the Lord the veil is removed” (2 Cor 3: 14-16). The symbolism of a ‘veil’ would seem to cover both culpable and inculpable unbelief, for a veil can be either self imposed or imposed by another. But in any case St. Paul holds out no hope for the salvation of his Jewish brethren as long as that ‘veil’ of unbelief in Jesus as the Christ still remains, for whatever reason, over their hearts. For he goes on to affirm that “even though our gospel is veiled, it is veiled for those who are perishing” (4: 3). Indeed, so convinced is Paul that his fellow Israelites cannot be saved without conversion to Christianity that he expresses “great sorrow and constant anguish” about their impending fate, and the heartfelt wish “that I myself were accursed and separated from Christ for my brothers according to the flesh” (Rom. (9: 2-3).
If anything, the N.T. shows an even greater clarity regarding the pre-evangelized state of the gentiles – the pagans. It practically spells out that even though their ignorance of Christ is presently invincible, they will not be saved unless that ‘darkness’ is overcome! For instance, Saul’s conversion on the road to Damascus is accompanied by a direct revelation from Our Lord himself. Jesus speaks to him of the gentiles “to whom I send you, to open their eyes that they may turn from darkness to light and from the power of Satan to God, so that they may obtain forgiveness of sins and an inheritance among those who have been consecrated by faith in me” (Acts 26: 17-18). In other words, while they are in that “darkness” (i.e.,ignorance of Christ’s gospel), they do not have the divine gift and virtue of faith that they need for forgiveness. On the contrary, they are under “the power of Satan”. In Romans 10: 9, Paul affirms as a condition for salvation the kind of faith in the Risen Christ that can be expressed by “confess[ing] with your mouth that Jesus is Lord”. That, obviously, is something that can only be done by a person whose faith in Jesus is conscious and explicit. Indeed, several verses later (vv. 13-17), Paul asks rhetorically, with anguish, how the pagans can be saved if they don’t receive a preacher.
Clearly, his anguish – and the question itself – would really make no sense if Paul held that the existing religious convictions of these gentile peoples can already constitute a disguised or implicit faith in Christ that is sufficient for their salvation. The only faith in Christ that the Apostle knows anything about is the faith that “comes from what is heard” (v. 17), namely, an explicit faith in the preached Gospel message. It is true that in Romans 2: 6-8 and 13-15 the Apostle speaks of the possibility of gentiles who have lived “without the law” being “justified” by following the natural law “engraved in their hearts”, since, as he says, it is “not the hearers, but the doers of the law, who will be justified” (v. 13). However, St. Paul has in mind here not the contrast between those who have and those who have not yet heard the Gospel of Christ, but rather, the contrast between Jews, who have received the Law of Moses, and gentiles who have not.
Moreover, keeping the law has to do with charity (good works flowing from love of God and neighbor) as a requirement for salvation, rather than the prior requirement of faith. It is obvious that Paul cannot be understood to be contradicting here the teaching he emphasises so strongly elsewhere, namely, that justification is not a reward for previously having kept the Law, but always has been, and always will be, an unmerited gift for which the primordial condition is faith in God’s revealed Word. So this passage of Romans by no means proves that those gentiles living after the coming of Christ can be saved if they die in ignorance of him. It would seem to mean nothing more than that gentiles (i.e., non-Jews) living either before or after Christ can die with the virtues of faith and charity, and if so will be saved on Judgment Day, even if they have never been catechized with the written law of the Decalogue.
Those who claim that ‘implicit faith’ in Christ or ‘anonymous Christianity’ still continue after Pentecost have, ever since the 16th century have invariably appealed to Hebrews 11: 6 as a proof-text for their opinion that, even under the New Law, a person’s belief can still constitute the theological virtue of faith even when its explicit, conscious content is limited to the existence of God and his role as Remunerator of good and evil.But they never seem to take into account the literary context of this verse, which is embedded in a whole chapter of Hebrews that speaks exclusively of holy men who lived and died in pre-Christian, and in many cases (vv. 4-22) pre-Mosaic, times. Therefore,especially in view of the rest of the N.T. witness, v. 6 can by no means be taken as serious biblical evidence that this very limited knowledge of God can still be sufficient to constitute the supernatural (theological) virtue of faith, now that Christ has finally come in the flesh. All the inspired author does in 11: 6 is give us a ‘lowest common denominator’ description of faith: he is revealing the basic, minimum intellectual content (namely, belief in a personal and morally righteous Supreme Being who remunerates human activity) that supernatural faith must include in every age of human history from Creation right through until Judgment Day. But the perennial necessity of this basic belief-content throughout salvation history does not logically imply its perennial sufficiency.
To sum up the witness of Sacred Scripture on this point, I believe we can say that the idea of someone’s being saved even after Pentecost by a merely ‘implicit’ or ‘subconscious’ faith in Christ – a ‘faith’ that actually knows nothing of Jesus and/or his identity as God and Savior – is quite foreign to biblical thought. While never directly and expressly ruled out by the New Testament, such an idea is rejected by implication.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
4 In an analaogous way, “revelation” or “divine revelation”, in Catholic theological discourse, always means “public revelation” unless the discussion is precisely about the distinction between this and so-called “private revelations”.
5 In John’s Gospel, “eternal life” does not mean exclusively life after death (i.e., being in heaven), but also
includes life in Christ in this present mortal existence.
