Sacred Tradition
In the light of the very strong biblical witness we have surveyed very briefly above, it is not at all surprising that for no less than one and a half millennia after Christ, no Catholic theologian ever suggested that anyone in New Testament times, anywhere on earth, could still receive justification and sanctifying grace in this life, much less attain eternal salvation in the next life, by means of a merely ‘implicit faith’ in Christ. Fr. Sullivan, who is anxious to demonstrate the continuing, perennial reality and salvific value of such a implicit ‘faith’, has combed the writings of the early Fathers, but draws a complete blank in this respect.
The closest any of the Fathers came to such a position, it seems, was an ambiguous remark of St. Justin Martyr in the 2nd century. Sullivan quotes it, but even he does not try to appeal to it as patristic evidence for the continuing salvific value of ‘implicit faith’ under the New Law. Rebutting the pagan and Jewish objection that, according to Christianity, God mercilessly left all before the coming of Christ with no way of salvation, Justin, like most if not all the other Fathers, indeed maintained that both Jews and gentiles“born before the time of Christ” could be saved if they lived “according to reason” (logos). He even goes so far as to say that such persons as Socrates and Heraclitus were “really Christians” (since Christ is, and always has been, the true Logos). He goes on to say that just as “those who lived before Christ but did not live according to reason were wicked men and enemies of Christ”, so “those who lived then, or who live now, according to reason, are Christians.” These last words could be taken to mean that some “who live now” may still be living “according to reason” without yet knowing Christ; but they are also entirely compatible with Justin’s holding, like all the subsequent Fathers, that after Christ’s coming only those who know and accept his Gospel are given the grace to live “according to reason”, that is, righteously in God’s sight. The very objection Justin is rebutting suggests strongly that the Church in his time, as subsequently, was teaching this latter, more severe, doctrine. Otherwise, it seems hard to imagine how the pagan and Jewish misunderstanding that Justin wants to clear up could have arisen in the first place.
He does, however, try to make the best of the ‘bad hand’ that has been dealt to him. For instance, in commenting on assertions of St. Cyprian (3rd century) such as, “There is no salvation for anyone except in the church”, and, “You cannot have God for your Father if you have not the church for your mother”, Sullivan makes much of the fact that these warnings were directed expressly to those who, having been members of the Church, had left her, or might be tempted to leave. In the case of such departure from the Church they would, in Cyprian’s judgment, be guilty of the mortal sins of heresy, schism or apostasy.
Sullivan stresses that “there is no instance of his [Cyprian’s] addressing this warning to the non-Christians who were still the majority of the people in the Roman empire of his day”. He thus insinuates that Cyprian might perhaps have been more hopeful for the salvation of those out-and-out pagans and Jews. However the saint’s words cited above, especially the emphatic “for anyone”, really speak for themselves. It is not taking them “out of context”, as Sullivan claims gratuitously, to conclude that Cyprian simply took it for granted that such non-Christians would be damned if they died in that condition, and that he therefore felt no need to write letters or treatises insisting on that fact. It is notorious that, according to St. Cyprian, the baptisms of heretics not only conferred no grace of the Holy Spirit, but were totally invalid. How much more, then, must he have been convinced that out-and-out non-Christians, without baptism of any sort, are certainly deprived of grace and Holy Spirit.
As for the Fathers who wrote on this subject from the 4th century onward, after the empire itself had become officially Christian, Sullivan has to acknowledge that they explicitly applied the maxim “outside the Church, no salvation” to pagans and Jews as well as apostate Christians. The best he can do for his case is to claim that for the late 4th-century Fathers, such pessimism was due mainly or even exclusively to their mistaken assumption that the Gospel had by that time been proclaimed everywhere, so that all remaining non-Christians must surely be blameworthy for their unbelief.
Moreover, in his concluding chapter Sullivan seems rather disingenuous, insofar as his summary of this
point leaves readers with the impression – more by what he omits than by what he affirms – that the aforesaid false assumption, that the Gospel had been preached everywhere, pretty much continued to dominate Catholic thought right up until the middle ages.
Such an impression would not correspond to historical truth. The evangelization of hitherto unreached pagans in different parts of Europe, North Africa, and the Far Eastern lands was progressing only very gradually. And nearly all contemporary church leaders would certainly have been aware of that fact. In other words, the continuing existence of multitudes of folks invincibly ignorant of the Gospel was perfectly well-known to the vast majority of first millennium Fathers, bishops and popes. And yet there is no record of any of them holding out hopes for the salvation of any of those folks if they died in their ignorance.
Corroborating the thesis they did not hold out any such hopes is the fact that in the opinion of many of these Fathers and Doctors, especially in the first five or six centuries, even catechumens would be eternally lost if they had the misfortune to die before receiving the saving waters of baptism! Even those usually cited as the pioneers of so called ‘baptism of desire’, St. Ambrose and St. Augustine, evidently vacillated on this issue.
For instance, St. Augustine said at one period, “However much progress the catechumen should make, he still carries the load of his iniquity: is it not removed from him unless he comes to baptism”. (The Faith of Our Fathers, Fr. Jurgens, bk. 3, 1496; On the Gospel of St. John, Chapter 13, Tract 7.) And St.Ambrose asserted, “Even a catechumen believes in the cross of the Lord Jesus, . . . but unless he be baptized in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, he cannot receive the gift of the remission of sins nor be a recipient of the gift of spiritual grace”. (Jurgens, The Faith of the Early Fathers, Vol. 2: 1330) Also, “‘Unless a man be born again of water and the Holy Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God’. No one excepted: not the infant, not the one prevented by some necessity”. (Jurgens, The Faith of the Early Fathers, Vol. 2: 1324)
St. John Chrysostom never accepted ‘baptism of desire’, and went as far as to preach that “the catechumen is a stranger to the faithful, . . . [so that] if it should come to pass (which God forbid!) that through the sudden arrival of death we depart hence uninitiated, though we have ten thousand virtues, our portion will be none other than hell”. (Homily 25 on the Gospel of John:3) St. Gregory Nazianzen was of the same mind, teaching that even in the case of catechumens who die unbaptized from “some perfectly involuntary circumstance”, this lack of the sacrament “prevents them from receiving the gift [of grace and salvation] even if they desire it”. (Oration 40: 23)
The souls of deceased catechumens were never prayed for in the ancient liturgy, and, simply because such persons lacked true membership in the Church, it took many centuries for a consensus to build up that a desire for baptism could sometimes save a catechumen, if he died suddenly before being able to receive the sacrament [CFT does not advocate this "development"--editor, Bill Strom].
Now, given that the possibility of salvation for even these explicit believers in Christ was considered at best uncertain by many or most first-millennium prelates, this bespeaks a strong underlying conviction that all those dying in a far worse spiritual condition than catechumens – that is, those without any explicit faith in Christ, and without any explicit desire for baptism – would certainly be damned, regardless of whether their unbelief was culpable or inculpable. It does not seem to have occurred to Sullivan that if the Fathers of the Church did not often put this conviction in writing, it was very probably because they considered it so elementary and undisputed as to go without saying!
However, this faith-conviction was sometimes expressed in writing, and not always just by individual Fathers writing in a private capacity. In fact, the solemn profession of faith of Pope Pelagius I, promulgated for the universal Church in the year 557, affirms the doctrine that on judgment day, God will hand over “to the punishment of eternal and inextinguishable fire” all of the wicked, who (he says) consist of “[those] who either did not know the way of the Lord, or, having known it, abandoned it, ensnared by transgressions of various kinds”.[Denzinger 228a] In other words, it is proposed as de fide by Pope Pelagius that a pagan’s or Jew’s ignorance of the Christian Gospel at death does not in any way diminish the certainty that he will be damned. Fr. Sullivan’s omission of this key magisterial text is certainly a serious flaw in his scholarship. However, he does at least let his readers know that St. Augustine taught explicitly that all unevangelized pagans – those living and dying in invincible ignorance of Christ – would certainly be damned.
Augustine maintained, however, that their damnation would not be a punishment for their unbelief itself – for in their case it would obviously be inculpable – but for other unrepented mortal sins, or original sin. (A millennium later theologians would develop such moral reasoning into explanations clarifying the distinction between ‘necessity of precept’ and ‘necessity of means’.)
Sullivan also cannot deny that the medieval theologians, led by St. Thomas Aquinas, were all unanimously insistent that an explicit faith in Christ has been universally necessary for salvation ever since the New Law of grace was revealed in the first century A.D.15.
For instance, speaking of the three eras in salvation history (before the Law [Sinai], from Sinai to Christ, and after Christ), Aquinas says: “In the third epoch, however, after the coming of Christ, all men are required to believe explicitly (omnes tenentur ad explicite credendum) [in the Redeemer], since by then the mystery of redemption was completed bodily and visibly and was preached. And if someone did not have an instructor, God would reveal it to him, unless he was left [ignorant] through his
own fault (et si aliquis instructorem non haberet, Deus ei revelaret, nisi ex sua culpa remaneret)”. The whole of my thesis could be summarized by saying that I simply wish to defend this teaching of St. Thomas as the true and authentically Catholic one. If anyone dies without even this elementary Christian faith, he will be damned; but this will be, as St. Thomas says, due to his own fault. That is, his being left in ignorance of Christ right till the very end of his life will be due to the fact that he did not persevere to the end instriving for truth and goodness.
This completes our survey of the witness of Sacred Tradition, which, as we noted already in our introductory remarks, was solemnly confirmed by the Ecumenical Council of Florence in 1442.
