Do Catholics CONDEMN Protestants to Hell?

Some Protestants claim that Catholics have declared them “anathema,” which condemns Protestants to hell. But is this true? Joe dives deep to find out.

Transcript:

Joe:

Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer and I want to cover a potentially sensitive topic today. This question of whether or not Catholics believe that all non-Catholics, Protestants, Orthodox and other non-Catholic Christians, as well as obviously non-Christians, whether we believe they’re all going to hell. And there’s a couple ways I want to approach this. First, this idea that the Catholic Church, Mizes Protestants, you’ll regularly hear certain Protestant speakers claiming, oh, the battled Catholic church has issued an anathema against the gospel and against Protestants, and they’ll usually point to the Council of Trent. And so one question worth asking, is any of that true? And what is an anathema and how does all that work? But then I want to get to actually the fundamental, just the heart of the question. So I actually think the anathema thing is a bit of a distraction and say, is it damnable not to be Catholic?

And what do we make of the biblical answer to that question? So let’s start with the anathema thing. As I say, you’ll find people saying Protestants are under an anathema, and you’ll find some Catholics saying, no, they’re not. And I think in some ways this sort of misses the mark. I think in a technical sense the answer is no. Somebody raised Protestant is not under an anathema for a pretty simple reason. An anathema as Dietrich Von Hildebrand points out in the charitable anathema is the pronouncement that you’ve been excluded from the community of the church. If you don’t retract your errors, you are presenting something heretical and damnable and non-Catholic, and there is no room in the church for that kind of idea. So if you’re going to persist in it, you’re cut off from communion with the church. The problem with applying that to people who were never Catholic in the first place is that it’s the equivalent of saying, well, fine, Taylor Swift, you’re getting married to Travis Kelsey, I guess we’re going to get a divorce.

You were never married, so you can’t divorce somebody you’re not married to. Well, similarly, you can’t excommunicate someone who is never in your communion. So an anathema, at least in the way like the 1917 code of Canon law uses the term it’s referring to an act of excommunication. And regularly when you see the term anathema used throughout the history of the church, particularly at councils, it’s referring to the beliefs, not even just of ordinary Christians, but of leaders like bishops and heretical teachings that if they persist in them, they’re going to be deposed and excommunicated and removed from the church. So it’s an important censure, it’s an important kind of penalty, but it’s intended for those erring members of the flock, those who are part of the Catholic communion, who are believing things and teaching things and leading people astray in a way that’s disruptive for the communion.

The second kind of thing that’s relevant here is the church has moved away from anathema, at least for now, and this is explicit at the opening address to the Second Vatican Council. Pope John 23rd talks about this and he talks about the modern errors that keep popping up and then kind of falling out of fashion. And he says the church has always opposed these errors and is often condemned them and indeed with the strongest severity as for the present time, the bride of Christ is pleased to apply the medicine of mercy rather than to take up the weapons of severity rather than condemning. She thinks that the power of her teaching should be more abundantly explained to meet the needs of the present day. Now, I want to point something out here. He’s reiterating like, look, we still reject error and we’ve even rejected it very strongly.

But right now, the most prudent thing doesn’t seem to be just saying, Hey, you’re damned, you’re going to hell. You’re not being a good Catholic to a bunch of people who are pretty openly not Catholic, and instead to positively lay out the Catholic teaching that prudentially, this seems like the better approach, and this is very much the kind of judgment call that a mother needs to make. If the church is meant to be moderate magistrate mother and teacher, there are going to be times when as a parent you rebuke and punish your kids and there are going to be times where you try to win your kids over and you might treat a young child and an older child pretty differently. You have to handle those cases sort of situationally. In other words, John the 23rd isn’t saying anathema is bad or we need to repudiate any of that.

He’s just saying in the modern context that we’re facing, anathema doesn’t seem like the thing that’s going to do the trick here. Rather we need to mercifully lay out the truth in an inviting kind of way. And he makes clear that this doesn’t mean that there aren’t fallacious teachings, opinions and dangers that need to be prevented and dissipated. We’re not just saying everything is great, but rather he says that these so openly conflict with the correct principles of honesty and have born such disastrous fruits that today men seem to be condemning them of themselves. In other words, think about the great errors of that time period in 1960s. You’ve just come out of a world that was facing fascism and nazim. You are in the middle of a world facing communism and certainly the church has plenty to say in response to that. But even if those things didn’t exist, plenty of people who’d lived under those systems could tell you of the horrors and the evils of the systems.

So in that sense, simply pointing out there is an alternative. You don’t have to live this way, you don’t have to believe these kind of things about the human person or to behave in these kind of manners, that might be the thing that’s more attractive. So there’s a pretty intentional, pretty explicit move away from the condemning with anathema. Now you’ll find people who think this was a bad move. So I think diet front Hildebrand is pointing out why anathema can be very good, and you’ll find modern people saying, we should continue to use anathema rather than this so-called medicine of mercy that John the 23rd lays out. All I want to say here is wherever you fall on that, recognize this is not a difference in doctrine. This is a difference in discipline and pastoral approach, and there is abundant scriptural evidence for any of these approaches and we see in different times and places the apostles themselves using different tools.

So for instance, in Galatians six, St. Paul says, brethren, if a man is overtaken in any trespass, you who are spiritual should restore him in a spirit of gentleness. Look to yourself, let you too be tempted. That’s very much like don’t take a harsh approach, take a gentle approach. But in this same letter three chapters earlier, St. Paul says to these same Galatians, oh, foolish Galatians, who has bewitched you before whose eyes Jesus Christ was publicly portrayed as crucified? Let me ask you only this. Did you receive the spirit by works of the law or by hearing with faith, are you so foolish? He is perfectly happy to say, Hey, dummies to the same people, he is telling that they need to be gentle. So there is a time and there are people who can receive a much harsher kind of rebuke. And so this is again, something that every parent knows or needs to know.

If you’ve got a child who’s already estranged, who’s on the verge of just running away from home, or maybe they’re an adult child who already has a tenuous relationship with them, if you lead with rebuke in condemnation in the rest, you’re probably not likely to win them over. You’re probably likely to just sever that relationship. You need to lead with that spirit of gentleness. On the other hand, if you have a really strong relationship, you have more room to just cut to the chase and be like, Hey, stop being an idiot. How about that? And the church does both of these things depending upon who she’s dealing with regularly. I hear people complain, it seems like traditional Catholics get treated more harshly by the church than people living these wild dissolute lifestyles. And I think there’s some truth to that, but I also think there’s some pastoral wisdom to that, that people who are already feeling estranged from the church are going to be treated more gently than people who feel very secure in their place in the church.

It’s a difference between Galatians three and Galatians six, and there’s really a lot of room in between. And so for instance, in Second Thessalonians, St. Paul says, if anyone refuses to obey what we say in this letter, note that man and have nothing to do with him that he may be ashamed, but do not look on him as an enemy, but warn him as a brother. So you see kind of a blend of some harshness and some gentleness in Paul’s approach. And I think there’s plenty of room for both and regularly, maybe the pendulum swings too far one way or the other. And the good news is, unless Pope Leo’s watching this, thanks for watching if you are Pope Leo, or unless a bishop is watching this or someone in a position to administer this kind of rebuke and judgment and do all of that disciplining you, and I don’t really need to worry about this.

We might think that the discipline is being done too loosely or too harshly or might have more complicated opinions on it, but just recognize that’s what’s going on. So I mention all of that just to explain kind of what anathema are in the life of the church, that they are this very strong censure of doing what two Thessalonians three says to tell someone, we’re not going to have anything to do with you and you should be ashamed. Your teachings are horrible, they’re not Catholic, you’re out of here. But we still want to warn you as a brother. Those two things we have to kind of keep in tandem, and that’s how we try to approach these kind of things. Now, all of that about the anathema is I think important for forming a well-formed historical understanding of this. So I think people get this question wrong a lot, but I actually think it doesn’t matter that much.

Now, I know that sounds strange, but what I mean by that is the question of whether Protestants are under an anathema or not is a really technical question. And the better question is, are these Protestant beliefs damnable? And there’s a popular idea that, oh, the church pre Vatican two believed that everyone who wasn’t Catholic was always going to hell, and then at Vatican two they rejected and reversed that teaching. And that’s not really true on either end. Pre Vatican two, you have people like Father Feeney who taught that everyone who wasn’t explicitly Catholic was going to hell and he was excommunicated for it, which would be terrifying if you’re a phite. I would think. On the other hand, Vatican II doesn’t just say, go do whatever the kind of popular idea that it just is like, oh, the church is the best option, but you do you isn’t true.

Rather very clearly the second Vatican Council talks about it being damnable not to be Catholic. That’s going to include being Protestant or being Orthodox or being anything but under the right conditions. So let’s make sure we get these conditions right. Lumen Genium talks about this in paragraph 14, basing itself on sacred scripture and tradition it the Second American Council teaches that the church now so journeying on earth as an exile is necessary for salvation. That’s the positive teaching the church is needed for salvation. Why? Well, they’re going to give some explanation, I’ll give some more Christ present to us in his body, which is the church is the one mediator and the unique way of salvation in explicit terms, he himself affirmed the necessity of faith and baptism and thereby affirmed also the necessity of the church for through baptism as through a door. Men enter the church, right?

If you say baptism is necessary for salvation and baptism is what brings you into the church, then you seem to necessarily have to say the church is necessary for salvation. That just follows logically. We’ll get into all that in a second. But the conclusion that the second American council draws from this is very explicit whosoever therefore, knowing that the Catholic church was made necessary by Christ would refuse to enter or remain in it could not be saved. So that seems to pretty clearly say two things that Vatican II is sometimes mischaracterized on. First it’s not teaching universalism, it’s not teaching. Everybody goes to heaven, it’s talking about things that are damnable. And second, it’s not teaching just kind of a religious indifferentism or even a denominational indifferentism. You can be Catholic or Orthodox or one of the Protestant denominations. That’s not what it’s teaching. It’s saying the church is necessary for salvation.

And if you know that and then refuse to become Catholic, you will go to hell L. That’s the teaching. So is that teaching just some crazy arrogance on the part of the Catholic church or is that teaching biblically sound? Now I’m going to lay out the necessity of the church. Now, I know that some people are going to look at this and say, well, how do we know that the visible church talked about in scripture is the Catholic church? And there’s a much longer answer to that that would involve looking at church history and identifying the church. And I’m not going to do all of that today. So what I’m going to show you as best I can is that being part of the flock of Christ, being part of the kingdom, being part of the visible church is necessary for salvation. And I just want you to work with me here and say, if the church is right, that it is the visible church and continues to be the visible church, then this at least logically makes sense.

You at least can’t reject the necessity of the church for salvation. You then have to say which church is necessary for salvation, right? What visible church am I meant to be a part of? And that’s a really good question to be asking. So let’s lay out the biblical case beginning with Ephesians chapter one in which St. Paul says the God of our Lord Jesus Christ. And then there’s a very, very long sentence, and then jumping from verse 17 to verse 22, the God of our Lord Jesus Christ has put all things under his feet and has made him Jesus the head over all things for the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all and all. So, okay, so we’ve just said that the church is the fullness of Jesus Christ. In the words of Saint Augustine, in homily one on the first epistle of John, he says to that flesh, the church is joined so that there’s made the whole Christ Christus Totos head and body.

So this seems pretty clearly to be the teaching that we find particularly from St. Paul, that the church in Christ are in a one flesh union. He says this in Ephesians five, and you see him laying out the foundation of this here in Ephesians one, that the church is a bride of Christ and is a body of Christ and is thus inseparable from Christ, so much so that we can speak of the church in Christ as just one. Now that is admittedly striking. That’s admittedly shocking to many people’s ears. I get why? But it’s also biblical. And I think St. Paul was in a great position to recognize this because in Acts chapter nine, Paul himself was on his way to Damascus to persecute any belonging to the way. Now, two things to notice there. One, he’s not persecuting Jesus individually. Jesus is in glory in heaven.

And two, the church is called the Way. Now that is already a divine title. Jesus says, I am the way, the truth and the life. And here the church is saying that she is the way. So is this a contradiction? Are there now two ways the church is teaching a different way than the way of Christ? If you’re someone who says, oh, you are putting the church against Christ, you could have that kind of uncharitable read of the New Testament, but I would suggest no, that the way is Christ and the way is the church and the two are so inseparable that you don’t have one without the other. That’s already a big clue of the necessity of the church for salvation because this is the way and no one comes to the Father except through the way John 14, six. So Saul’s persecuting the way and Jesus appears to him or a light, he hears a voice from heaven and says, Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me, not my church?

Me SA then says, who are you Lord? To which he hears, I am Jesus whom you are persecuting. So there’s this really radical identification where to persecute the church is to persecute Jesus, to kill members of the church is to kill members of the body of Christ. It is to directly attack Jesus Christ. That is how close this union is. And if you think about head and body, that kind of makes sense. If somebody starts hammering your arm for some reason, you don’t say like, oh, well you’re just going after my body. You’re not going after me. You say no attack. You’re literally attacking me. So that’s this radical identification of Christ in the church. So you can’t separate the two.

By the way, I have this Gio image of the conversion of St. Paul. It’s very common in western art to present Paul falling from a horse. There’s no reference to horse. He’s probably on a camel, but whether horse or camel, I want to actually talk about sheep instead because one of the ways Jesus positively lays out this teaching is in John 10 when he describes his mission. He says, I have other sheep that are not of this fold, meaning the visible people of the Jews. I must bring them also and they will heed my voice. So there shall be one flock, one shepherd. So Jesus in the Old Testament had a visible people, Israel, the Jewish people are the visible people of God, but there were other people who were in relationship with him and Jesus desired that they would all be one flock. Now that seems to very strongly indicate that he doesn’t just want them to remain like one people invisibly spiritually.

They already could claim that if it just means I want the people who follow me to follow me wherever they are, they can be in a bunch of different denominations. They’ve got that right. They’ve already got that in John 10. Jesus seems to be suggesting there’s going to be a flock where they’re going to be actually gathered together in some way. And in the next chapter, St. John reminds us that Jesus was sent to die for the nation Israel, but not for the nation only, but to gather into one the children of God who are scattered abroad. So again, the Messianic mission includes the gathering together of the lost tribes of Israel and indeed the faithful Gentiles as well, to gather them together into a single people of God. This is what the word church means. Ecclesia in Greek means like an assembly or a gathering.

This is the bringing together of the people, which again seems to really strongly suggest this is being done with a visible church because you sometimes have this idea that like, oh, the church is just like this invisible reality of all the saved. You already would’ve had that back in John 11. You already had children of God in all these various contexts and nations. If that’s all the church is that already existed, then what’s Jesus doing? What’s he gathering together? What does that even mean? There already is gathered as they’re going to be. They’re just in a thousand different places unconnected, but they’re all children of God. No, the Ecclesia is gathering together an invisible assembly, an unassembled assembly. I don’t know what that is, a disembodied body, a kingdom that no one can see. I mean, what are we talking about here? So the biblical evidence points to there being as a central part of Jesus’s mission.

He doesn’t come to give us the New Testament. He doesn’t do that during his earthly mission. He comes instead to form a church to gather together the Jews and Gentiles, the Jews first, and then the Gentiles are the apostolic mission into this visible people. This visible assembly called the church in Ephesians five St. Paul talks about it like this. He says, the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body and is himself its savior. So Christ is the savior of the church, but the church is both his bride and his body. Those two images are going to be very important because just as a husband loves his wife, Christ loves the church and gives himself up for her that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word that he might present the church to himself in splendor without spot a wrinkle or any such thing that she might be holy and without blemish.

So Christ comes to die for the church to save the church. This is at the core of his mission. And so if you don’t understand this role of the church, then you don’t understand why Jesus comes into the world. You don’t understand why he dies on the cross. You’re missing this huge portion of Christianity and the idea of having Jesus without the church, having the king, without the kingdom or the shepherd without the flock or the head, without the body or the bride, groom without the bride becomes unthinkable if you have a sound christology and a good biblical understanding of who Jesus is and why he came. So let’s turn in a darker direction to talk about the antichrist. There’s a lot of popular musing about the antichrist, the left behind series. It has these apocalyptic visions and you’ll have people who suggest, oh, the pope’s the antichrist.

This was a popular argument of the reformers, and I think many times people talk about this without ever taking the time to actually read what the Bible says about the antichrist or what the early Christians said about the antichrist. So for instance, in second John St. John says, for many deceivers have gone out into the world, men who will not acknowledge the coming of Jesus Christ in the flesh. Such a one is the deceiver and the antichrist. On a literal level, John is accusing gnostics and particularly the doist gnostics of being antichrist because they’re denying the incarnation. But early Christians like Saint Augustine pointed out that there are other ways that you can functionally be an antichrist. You can deny the incarnation by having a disembodied incarnate kind of Christianity. And this is particularly true of thematics. Now he’s worried about the donus, but I think his general point here stands.

Augustine said he Christ came to gather and won. You come to Unmake like you are creating a bunch of different denominations rather than uniting people together, you would pull Christ members as sunder. How can it be said that you don’t deny that Christ has come in the flesh when you render a sunder, the church of God which he has gathered together. Therefore, you go against Christ, you are an antichrist. That’s his argument that look, if Christ comes to gather the church as his body and you attack the body of Christ, you are an antichrist. That’s the argument. So then the question would be like, well, can you be an antichrist and be saved? And it seems like the answer to that would be pretty obviously. No. So somebody who makes war on the Catholic church, somebody who makes war on the visible church is making war on Christ.

They are persecuting Christ just as St. Paul was, and they are cutting themselves off from union with him, putting the matter positively again, Jesus. In John 17, I mentioned this passage a lot, so I’m not going to belabor it here. Jesus in John 17 prays for future disciples and his prayer for us specifically knowing all of the scandals for all of history, he’s not praying that we won’t be part of the visible church because it’s going to go corrupt. And when it’s going to become an apostate, we got to watch out for it. We got to separate from it. No, he doesn’t do any of that. He prays that we will all be one even as he and the father are one. And then he prays that we’ll be perfectly one. That’s the positive case. So you should be part of the church that Christ calls you to be perfectly one with.

To say that you can be perfectly one while being in schism is of course ludicrous. So this seems like a call for visible church unity negatively. St. Paul says in Galatians five that those who do things like have schisms dissension, the party spirit cannot enter the kingdom of God. So it is damnable to reject this. So let’s gather together these various strains of what we find from the New Testament and how the early Christians understood it with the writings of Saint Cian, this is a pretty famous passage. The spouse of Christ cannot be adulterous. She’s uncorrupted and pure. She knows one home, she guards with chased modesty, the sanctity of one couch. She keeps us for God. She appoints the sons whom she is born for the kingdom. Whoever is separated from the church and is joined to an adulterous is separated from the promises of the church, right?

Think about it kind of makes sense. If Christ promises to die for the church, he’s promising salvation to the church and you cut yourself off from the church. That seems like you’re cutting yourself off from the covenant promises. That’s how a covenant works, right? Nor can he who forsakes the church of Christ attain to the rewards of Christ. He’s a stranger. He’s profane, he is an enemy. He can no longer have God for his father who has not the church for his mother. Cyprian goes on to suggest that you would have as much hope of salvation leaving Noah’s Ark. Now this is an important biblical image. Obviously the reference in Genesis to Noah’s Ark, but also in one Peter three St. Peter depicts what happens with Noah’s Ark as salvation through water and says, baptism corresponds to this and now saves you that it’s salvation through water today.

But of course if Noah’s Ark Prefigures baptism salvation through water, what is the arc in that? Well, the arc would seemingly be the visible church. And so Cyprian is drawing on that to suggest to leave the visible church would be jumping out of the ark and hoping you could just swim. It is, in other words, not a road to salvation. So all of that explains why we think being Catholic is super important. It is not enough to say you have God as your father if you don’t serve the church as your mother. And in saying that, we’re not adding some extra burden because the way Christ and the way the church are united, they’re one. The two have become one flesh as St. Paul says in Ephesians five. So all we’re doing is presenting the true Christ, the full Christ, the whole Christ, Christus Totos, head and body.

Now that if I just stopped right here, might seem like really bad news. What about all of the people who aren’t united in invisible way to the church? Does this mean that they’re just completely hopeless? And the answer to that is no. So let’s talk about why there’s still hope, and I want to talk about it in a couple of different ways. I want to actually return to the necessity of baptism because that’s something, if you remember the second Vatican Council points to as one of the reasons we know the church is necessary because baptism is the doorway to the church. There’s a famous line in Mark 1616 where Jesus says that he who believes and is baptized will be saved, but he who does not believe will be condemned. Now that seems pretty straightforward. You’ve got to believe and be baptized to be saved.

And if you don’t, or at least if you don’t believe you’ll be condemned, it’s right there. But think about cases like unborn children who die. Does this mean that all unborn children cannot be saved? They’re all going to hell. The church has never taught that Christians have never believed that they’re all unsaved in this. I mean, look, the holy innocence have a feast on the calendar that they’re celebrated liturgically. Now I can understand absolutely people who say we don’t know for sure what happens to them, but you couldn’t just say from Mark 1616 that they’re all condemned in the way that an unbelieving adult would be condemned. At least I hope, because you have passages like for instance, Matthew 19, where little children are brought to Jesus and he says, let the children come to me and do not hinder them for to such belongs the kingdom of heaven.

So we know Christ loves little children, wants them in the kingdom, and we know that the ordinary means believing in baptism aren’t available for the smallest of the little children like the unborn. And then there’s this big debate about at what age can you really believe in a biblical sense? And I’m not going to get into all of that, but just recognize that we should be at least aware, okay, Christ has these rules, but there are some people who seem to be literally incapable of fulfilling them, the severely disabled. For instance, if there’s a scene in the rock opera, Tommy where they’re worried that he’s born or becomes actually deaf, dumb and blind, he can’t see or hear or speak and they wonder if he can possibly be saved, that kind of model of well, how could he possibly do the things Christ is telling him to do?

Now here I think it’s important to make a twofold distinction first to remember the examples of Peter and John in John 21 and then to take a common sense analogy from parenting. So first Peter and John, Jesus tells Peter that he’s going to be martyred and then he says, follow me very clear instructions to which Peter wants to know what’s going to happen to John. And he says, Lord, what about this man? And Jesus says, if it’s my will that here man until I come, what is that to you? Follow me. In other words, when you read the commandments of Christ in the gospel, the point of this isn’t to use this as a cudgel to condemn your neighbor who hasn’t heard these commands. The point is you need to follow Jesus. Now, don’t mishear that. I’m not saying you shouldn’t also present the gospel to your neighbor, but I am saying the point of when Jesus says Do X, don’t do Y, that’s addressed at you.

It’s not addressed to the person who doesn’t hear it, at least not yet. It will be addressed to them when they hear and receive it, but at this point it is addressed to you. So when Jesus says this is necessary, that’s necessary for you the listener, that’s different than someone who has no access to it. So think about at the time of Christ, you have people living in north and South America. It doesn’t follow that all of them automatically just start going to hell because Jesus suddenly says you have to believe and be baptized that now they’re all damned. It doesn’t follow logically. You have Jews living in Alexandria who were faithfully holding to the mosaic law who hadn’t yet heard of Jesus. It doesn’t follow that what had been a saving life-giving faithful relationship suddenly becomes a damnable rejection of Christ because they didn’t know he existed, right?

Think about just the concrete cases in the first century. If it helps, those would be examples of Peter hearing a message and then trying to apply it to John Peter, hearing a message needs to apply it to Peter. And so when you hear you need to do this, that is to you. Now we can ask what about my neighbor? But it’s fair to say part of the answer is just what is that to you? Follow Jesus. That’s the biblical kind of basis. The Cummins sense parenting would just be this. Every parent knows the difference. When you say it’s time to come to the car and one kid just slightly refuses to obey and another kid doesn’t hear you at the external level, their action or lack thereof is identical, or maybe you say it’s time to stop playing. We got to come inside and clean up and both continue playing.

One of them heard you, one of them was too far away to hear you. You as a reasonable rational actor understand that even though the action was different, the behavior isn’t different from a moral standpoint. You’re not going to judge them the same way. You’re not going to punish them the same way because one heard and disobeyed and one didn’t hear. Now that’s not just common sense, that’s actually biblical, but we’re going to get into that in a second. The basic principle is this. When the Bible says something is damnable, that by itself doesn’t mean you will in fact be damned. This is one of the three ingredients as it were, for something to be actually damning. Mortal sin requires in addition to the thing itself being damnable, you also have full knowledge that you know the sinful character of the act and second complete consent that you are voluntarily doing it.

You are acting knowingly or maybe intentionally ignorantly in opposition to God’s law. And this isn’t just like again, the teaching of the Catholic church. This isn’t just sound moral theology and moral philosophy. This is very clearly Christian teaching and biblical teaching. Here’s what I mean by that. I think everybody intuitively understands the church teaches well. Christianity teaches that sex outside of marriage is a sin that should be very clear. But imagine a couple cases, one where a man believes that he’s married to his wife, but unbeknownst to him, she actually was married to someone else previously. So even when we went through a marriage ceremony, it would be bigamy. And so they’re not actually married in the eyes of God, but he has no way of knowing that because she has kept this from him. Is he sinning? Is he committing fornication every time they engage in the marital act?

No, she is. He’s not. Second case, let’s say a woman is sexually assaulted, is she sinning? Of course not. In the first case, the man consented to the action, but without knowledge of it being an opposition to God’s law, he thought he was doing a good thing when in fact he was doing something objectively evil. In the second case, the woman knew the thing was evil being done to her, but she has no capacity to consent because it’s being done against her will. So in both cases, the actual action sex outside of marriage is evil and even damnable. But in one case the man’s not culpable because he lacks knowledge and the other case the woman is in culpable because she lacks consent. So you need that trifecta. I think those are the clearest kind of examples. So people who think that this is some kind of legalism, just challenge them on that and say, what would you do in these cases?

Because if someone actually believes that that would be damnable, even if a person was completely innocent, had no idea this was wrong or completely innocent because they had no control over it, that’s the actual legalism because you’re taking the violation of the law with no rationality and applying it in an unthinking sort of way. But as I say, this isn’t just intuitive kind of common sense. This is also very clearly biblical teaching. In Luke 12, Jesus says he gives the example of a parable involving a servant and masters and he says, the servant who knew his master’s will but didn’t make ready or act according to his will shall receive a severe beating. That guy is intentionally disobedient. He’s going to be punished harshly, but he who did not know and did what deserved a beating, she’ll receive a light beating. So there’s some consequence there, but he’s not being punished with this severe beating.

But then the general principles laid out in verse 48, everyone to whom much is given of him much will be required and of him to whom men commit much, they’ll demand the more. So the more you have, the more is expected of you. You see this laid out very clearly in the parable of the talents. Different people have different amounts and you are judged based on what you have, not what your neighbor has. So the guy who turns two talents into four is praised for this. If the guy with five talents had turned it into four, that would’ve been a disaster. So God is not unthinking, unmerciful or irrational. He knows what you know and he knows what you were capable of doing with the tools he gave you. He knows better than you do and we’ll get into that later. Don’t use this as an excuse because God knows when you’re capable of more than you act like you’re capable of.

So you see here in Luke 12 that if you don’t have the capacity or the awareness, because in verse 47, the servant doesn’t realize the thing is wrong in verse 48, some people are given more than others. So if you lack the capacity or lack the awareness, those are all mitigating factors. Now, this is sometimes not a simple yes no. Sometimes there’s kind of a sliding scale. Some people are more aware or more capable, some people are less aware, less capable, where they might still be punished somewhat, but it’s mitigating. We’ll talk about how we don’t have to get into all of that. We should know these things exist. We should know these principles exist. They should give us good grounds for hope, but they’re not going to give us the tools we need to judge everyone in the world because we can’t see the interior of our neighbor.

We can’t judge how much he actually knew. We can’t judge how much he actually consented. But we do know this, Jesus, when he is on the cross, can say, father, forgive them for they know not what they do. And I think it is worth wrestling with that. In Malcolm X’s last recorded speech, he kind of mocks this idea. He’s making fun of the nonviolent civil rights movement, Luther King and the like and talking about how they keep quoting this line. Father forgive them for they don’t know what they do, and in fact they do know you sit there when they put the rope around your neck saying, forgive them law. They know not what they do as long as they’ve been doing it there expert at they know what they’re doing. But here’s the thing, I think Malcolm X’s words there could also be applied against Jesus.

How can you possibly say Jesus Father, forgive them for they don’t know what they do. These are the religious leaders in the first century. How could they possibly not know? And I, I’ve had people point this out to say, Hey, as a Catholic church, you believe in invincible ignorance and there are some people who don’t know better and might be saved in spite of not being Catholic. But this person objected. I know all about the Catholic church. I’ve read all these books and so on and so forth. So don’t you at least have to logically say I won’t be saved. And in response I pointed out, look, if Jesus can plead ignorance for the Jewish leaders who knew Judaism much better than Catholicism, that seems like God knows the interior of a man better than we do from an outsider’s perspective, I wouldn’t have thought that the Jewish leaders were ignorant.

I wouldn’t have thought that they didn’t know what they do, but Jesus does. And you might say maybe he means somebody else. I mean the Romans definitely knew what they were doing in crucifixion, but maybe they didn’t know the theology. But the thing is, we have passages like for instance, one Corinthians two that explicitly say that the rulers of this age didn’t understand the wisdom of God, and if they had, they wouldn’t have crucified the Lord of glory. So there it’s not just about the people, it’s specifically about the rulers like the leaders as well who again seem to have been the sort of theological. So God will judge not just did you do a bad thing like go into schism or refuse to join the Catholic church? He will judge that with the twofold criteria of did you do it knowingly and did you do it willingly?

And he knows that better than you know it. He knows it certainly better than your neighbor knows it. But this also means we can know these tools exist, but we don’t know which of our neighbors this applies to. So if you’re hoping to come away from this saying, I’m going to be able to say which of my non-Catholic friends and relations are going to hell and which ones aren’t, I can’t tell you that and I don’t think you’re meant to know that. Instead, I think we’re giving a sort of twofold message, one of warning and one of hope, and I think we see that very clearly in chapter 10 of St. Paul’s epistle to the Romans. I’m going to just go a little bit slowly through Romans 10 because I fear that Romans 10 is often diced up in ways that aren’t faithful to Paul’s actual argument that people take out the parts that they happen to like that either sound really easy or sound really harsh without realizing he’s saying all of these things together and that they make more sense together.

So begin around verse eight. He talks about how if you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe with your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. Great. That sounds very good for a man believes with his heart and so is justified and he confesses with his lips and so is saved. So that sounds good. I mean, I often hear this from people who just say, just be some kind of Christian, just believe Jesus is Lord. And then it doesn’t really matter if you’re in the visible church and I get where they’re going by taking just this one line while ignoring the broader teaching of St. Paul. I think that’s a bad way to do scripture. But there’s this very hopeful sounding passage. On the other hand, it’s not very hopeful sounding for those who don’t believe that Jesus rose from the dead who maybe have never heard of Jesus again, think about the various Native American tribes at the time.

Jesus was raised from the dead. Did they believe Jesus was raised from the dead? They didn’t sorry to anyone who may believe in the Book of Mormon. They don’t know about this. So is Paul saying that they’re going to hell? Let’s find out the good news again, St. Paul verse 11, scripture says, no one who believes in him would be put to shame. And this applies as he points out both the Jew and Gentiles and the Lord is Lord of all and bestows his riches upon all who call upon him. For everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord will be saved Again, this sounds like very good news and it’s probably important to remember here that the point Paul is making is that God isn’t just choosing to save some nations or ethnicities and not others. And if that’s true of Jew and Greek seemingly, that would also be true of Choctaw and Cherokee or the various peoples of Sub-Saharan Africa or fill in the blank that at least if you say, yeah, God wanted 0% of those people to be saved, that seems to contradict the vision and revelation of faithful from every nation under heaven before him.

But fine, we’ll get into all that again, though you have on the one hand, great, if you believe in him, you won’t be put to shame. On the other hand, what does this mean for those who don’t know the name of the Lord? If everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord will be saved, this is going somewhere for Paul because he asks, but how are men to call upon him and whom they have not believed and how are they to believe in him of whom they have not heard? And how are they to hear without a preacher? And how can men preach unless they’re sent as is written? How beautiful are the feet of those who preach good news? So if you’re worried about this problem of what is going to happen to people who haven’t heard the gospel, Paul’s first answer is Sounds like you better go preach the gospel.

Right? That’s his answer. It’s not to say maybe they’ll still be saved. His first answer is to say, better go preach the gospel to them so they can believe. He also points out that even if you do that, they might still reject it. He says, but they have not all heated the gospel. Isaiah says Lord, who has believed what he has heard from us? But then he concludes his argument here. So faith comes from what is heard and what is heard comes by the preaching of Christ. Now, I have often seen this just taken with, as I say, the conclusion right there in verse 17 as just the end of Paul’s argument. Everyone who’s going to be saved knows the name of Jesus has accepted Jesus as their personal Lord and Savior believes in the resurrection and therefore they can go to heaven. That’s all you need.

That’s exactly what you need. If you have anything less than that, you can’t be saved. If you have anything more than that, it doesn’t really matter. It might even get in the way because you just need just this. That’s the way I’ve kind of heard Romans 10 used. And it’s a bad interpretation of Romans 10 because the chapter doesn’t actually stop there because Paul knows how you might misunderstand because he’s just talked about how there are people who haven’t heard the gospel. And so he says in verse 18, but I ask, have they not heard? Indeed they have for their voice has gone out to all the earth and their words to the ends of the world. So he’s claiming that every nation has heard the gospel. Now, even in Paul’s day, he would’ve known that there were people that were uncontacted tribes. There were nations that had not yet received the gospel.

We know today that there’s two entire continents, but they knew then not everything was the Roman empire. And so there were plenty of people and plenty of nations who hadn’t heard the gospel, particularly at the time. Romans is being written. There’s big chunks of the Roman empire that still haven’t heard the gospel yet. So what does he mean here and how does this fit in with his argument? Well, critical to understanding this is understanding the passage that he references. It says their voice has gone out to all the earth. What voice? What does that mean? Well, it turns out he’s quoting Psalm 19. Psalm 19 says, the heavens are telling the glory of God. The ferment proclaims his hand, work day to day, pours for speech and night to night declares knowledge. There is no speech, nor are there words. Their voice is not heard yet their voice goes out through all of the earth and their words to the end of the world.

So notice here, Paul is explicitly citing to Psalm 19, which is explicitly not about the oral proclamation of the gospel. There is no speech. There are no words. That the voice here instead is just the majesty of the heavens. The heavens are telling the glory of God that creation itself silently bears witness to the reality of God. Now, if that’s true, the have they not heard is not saying nature has revealed the truth of the resurrection. No. There’s something much more basic that is known and knowable from nature alone. So read Romans 10, not just including verse 18, but also in context of Psalm 19 and of Romans one, where St. Paul begins to lay out this idea of the fact that even people who haven’t heard the gospel orally have already been exposed to the gospel in one sense in Romans one, he’s talking about the wicked and he says, the wrath of God has revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and wickedness of men who by their wickedness, suppressed the truth.

Now, notice there his accusation against the wicked is not that they don’t know the truth. It is that they suppress the truth. He’s explicit about this. He says, what can be known about God is plain to them because God has shown it to them. I’m going to say that again. What can be known about God is plain to them because God has shown it to them. Ever since the creation of the world, his invisible nature, namely his eternal power and deity has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made. So obviously you don’t know from the creation of the world that Jesus froze from the dead. Jesus hadn’t risen from the dead creation of the world. That’s not a fact knowable from this kind of natural theology that St. Paul’s talking about here in Romans one. But you can just from the reality of creation, know that it has a creator and you can know something about the creator even if you don’t know him directly.

Think about it almost like tracing animal footprints in the woods. You can know Well without having seen this creature, I know the kind of foot it has because I can see the kind of footprint you might be able to tell if you’re a real expert, how much the animal weighs, how fast it’s moving, how large it is, all those kind of questions, you can derive a lot of knowledge from just the world in front of you about what you don’t see. And that’s also true about God. That’s Paul’s argument. And so Paul is pretty explicitly saying in Romans 10, yet God hasn’t just abandoned the rest of the world because he’s spoken to them in these other ways. But he wants to present this in a way that you don’t say, oh, okay, then I don’t have to evangelize. You do need to evangelize, but you should be aware that there is some kind of evangelical effort as it were, that has already happened as the voice of God through nature and creation goes out through all the world.

There’s more that could be said about that, but it means that clearly what Paul is arguing for isn’t just all these other nations are all going to hell because he’s saying that they’ve already heard something from God. And the whole point of them hearing something from God is that they can either suppress the truth or accept the truths, and we’re going to return to that. The early Christians took that idea very seriously and they started to look around and speculate, which of the various pagans seem to have heard and accepted the truth rather than the wicked ones who heard and suppressed the truth. So I think a helpful metric, I think I’ve used this before. I love the presidential seal of the United States. Look, if you’re not American, there’s plenty of things. Americans are really into that. I can understand you being like that doesn’t seem that great.

But let’s be honest, this is an amazing presidential seal. It’s got an eagle, and the eagle has in one Talon, 13 arrows representing war, and in the other talon in all of branch with 13 leaves representing peace. And so he is prepared for war, but he’s looking for peace. The eagle is pointing in the direction of the olive branches and not in the direction of the arrows. The point there being, we are prepared for the worst, we’re hopeful for the best. Well, likewise, as Christians, I think we need to be prepared for the fact that your non-Christian, your non-Catholic neighbor, might be going to hell. And on the other hand, we still want to have a grounded and reasonable hope that they’re not. So why do we need both of those? On the one hand, if you don’t have the hope for their salvation, let’s say you have a beloved great Aunt Millie, and she dies the age of 94. This is an imaginary person. I’m not telling some family story, and Millie was like a devout Methodist. Is she in the eyes of God as sch asthmatic? Probably not. We’ll get into that in a second so we can hope that Millie is in heaven awaiting us.

On the other hand, if Millie’s alive, you should tell her about Catholicism and invite her to become Catholic. You shouldn’t just assume, ah, Millie’s good enough and leave it alone. No. If we’re serious about taking Jesus’s prayer seriously, that we should all be one. We should actually do things to help become one more fully. Now, that includes a lot of things. That includes sometimes debating Catholic Protestant issues. A lot of this channel exists because of this, but it isn’t just correcting people. Remember the earlier part, there are times where gentleness is needed and affirming what they’re already getting right? And you can create deeper bonds of unity through that as well, to draw people more fully into this one family, this one society, the people whom Christ died for and wills to go to heaven. So the early Christians clearly do this. They on the one hand look for people, as I said, who they think might be saved or might have been saved.

And on the other hand, they continue to preach the necessity of Christ for salvation. And I want to be very clear here. The argument isn’t Jesus is needed for Christians and not for everybody else. The argument is Jesus is known explicitly to Christians and might be known in a more mysterious way to other people. So St. Paul, for instance, and when he’s at the opus in Athens, in Acts 17, he talks about this temple or this altered to an unknown God, and he says that this is the God that he’s going to proclaim to them. And then he talks about how God has overlooked their past ignorance, but that time is over, right? He’s assuming everything. We talked about knowledge being really important as a condition. But look, if somebody is worshiping God, truly as seems to have been the case in Acts 17, but they don’t know who he is, that person, if they really do love God, will want to have a deeper relationship with him.

So sometimes people will take everything that we’ve talked about so far, and they’ll come away with this kind of antigo that, oh, okay, we need to leave everybody in ignorance so that they don’t have more moral accountability. And that’s idiotic. It’s idiotic because of what St. Paul says. They’ve already got something. And a lot of them have probably rejected it in Il in their own salvation. And so maybe the person who rejected the moral law, who rejected the kind of natural arguments for God they find in nature, might hear the gospel and be so moved that they come to accept what they had previously rejected. The gospel is good news, and there are many people who had they just been left in ignorance, who seemingly would not be in heaven. So how do we apply this desiring the best and having a grounded hope that perhaps that they are more Christian, more Catholic than they seemed, and on the other hand, still doing the evangelical work.

A great example of this in the one hundreds is St. Justin Martyr. He’s arguably the first apologist. He’s the patron and saint of apologists, and he’s writing in defense of Christianity to the Roman Emperor. He’s wanting everyone to become Catholic. But nevertheless, he talks about how Christ is the logos. And the word logos is translated as word, but it also includes this idea of the logic or blueprint. Logos is where we get the word logical from. And so logos is tied to reason as well as to Word. And so he says, we’ve been taught that Christ is the firstborn of God. We’ve declared above that he is the word, the logos of whom every race of men were partakers, notice that we’re partakers. He is not of the view that nobody had any access to the logos until Jesus has declared He’s of the view that Jesus has already revealed himself in some way, shape or form to men of every race.

And then he says, those who lived reasonably. That is those who lived according to the logos are Christians, even though they’d been thought as atheists. And he gives examples among the Greeks of Socrates and Haitis men like them, and among the barbarians, Abraham and Anaya Nazarre and Mishael and Elias, Elisha and many others. So he’s saying, we’ve got all these obvious Old Testament Jewish examples, but you also have these Greek examples of people like Socrates and Haitis who were living according to the logos. Now notice you might say, well, why does he even include the Old Testament figures? His point is those Old Testament figures had a relationship with Jesus Christ, even though they didn’t know him by that name, like the Azariah and Micha, these are like Daniel’s friends, Shadrach, Micha and Abednego. Those are the Greek seaburn names.

And so those friends of Daniel seemingly don’t have some special revealed knowledge that God has triune and the second person is going to come into the world. They don’t have any of that. Nevertheless, they’re willing to be put to death as non-believers by Nebuchadnezzar because they know that there is a true God. And in fact, Jesus appears to them as a fourth figure in the fire. And so we see this kind of relationship they have with him as the logos, a personal relationship with Jesus that they didn’t even know his name. It is beautiful. Then you say, okay, what about the Greeks, Socrates and Haitis? They clearly believe in some God who isn’t just the mythical Greek and Roman gods. They believe there is a one true God beyond all that, and there is, I believe, among Haitis explicitly a knowledge of the logos as this divine blueprint for the cosmos.

So when John one describes Jesus as the logos, he’s tapping into a term that comes to us from Greek philosophy or is used in Greek philosophy. And so he’s not repudiating all of that. He’s saying there’s something the Greeks had and there’s something that the Jews had with the Old Testament in the beginning from the Old Testament. Jesus is the logos that’s from the Greek philosophy, and he’s showing that both of them have some limited knowledge of the truth. Justin seems to take that for granted and just follows it to its logical conclusion that these guys were living according to the logos, they were Christians, people like Abraham. It sounds weird to say Abraham was a Christian. It sounds very anachronistic, but if you understand Christ as the logos, it’s true. And likewise with people like Socrates. Socrates was a Christian. He didn’t know it, but he was.

Abraham didn’t maybe know it and he was whether what he knew he was a little complicated. It doesn’t matter. Certainly the Old Testament faithful like the non-big names, they don’t all have some prescient foreknowledge that Christ is coming into the world as Jesus of Nazareth, and yet they still believe and are saved by Jesus. Okay? The flip side of that though, as Justin points out, is that even they who lived before Christ and lived without reason, without the logos were wicked and hostile to Christ and slew those who lived reasonably. So as St. Paul points out in Romans one, look, I guess I should stop and say this. I mentioned before the kind of antigo, the people who say, oh, well just don’t evangelize, don’t convert people, and that way they’ll be in this blessed ignorance. This is a sort of noble savage vision of those people who’ve not heard the gospel, and that is naive and insulting.

The reality is people who have not heard the gospel, like people who have, or people who have not heard the fullness of the gospel, like people who have, are drawn towards sin and all of the sins that we are, and they can live according to reason because their intellect tells ’em to, or they can live against reason because their passions tell them to. They’re cut from the same cloth and Romans one and the first apology of just martyr both stress. Yeah, plenty of people choose the bad option there, and they’re enemies of Christ even though they don’t know the name of Christ, just as the righteous are followers of Christ, even though they don’t know the name of Christ. So where does that leave us? On the one hand, I think it leaves us here. Oh yeah. You know what? I should actually add one point here.

I think it’s very well worth stressing. I gave you the example of the early church, but by the medieval period, there’s much more of a background assumption that everyone knows not just the kind of logos but has actually heard the gospel. Because when you’re writing in Christendom in Europe, that’s more or less true. There may be some people who are little kids in a Jewish ghetto who’ve just literally not heard the gospel, but they can kind of take for granted that the people of whom they’re speaking about whom they’re speaking know the gospel. And if they’re not Christians, they’ve rejected it. Now, look, we can get into whether that’s knowledge in the sense God intends, but it was much more taken for granted. People who weren’t Christians or were non-Catholics were intentionally apostates, we’re intentionally matics, we’re intentionally heretics, and now we don’t make that same assumption.

There’s a difference between someone who grows up in the Catholic church and rejects Catholicism. They grow up going to mass all the time. They’re formed in a devout and well-formed Catholic institution and they reject it all and they become a Protestant or whatever. There’s a difference between them and like the devout Protestant in say, Sweden, whose family has been Lutheran for 500 years and that’s all they’ve known, that’s all their society really has. Those two people are in a very different moral category. One seemingly as guilty of the sin of schism. The other one is not. Now that second person should still become Catholic, and if somehow they hear the fullness of the gospel, they realize, oh, look, I can read all about the visible church. And clearly it wasn’t the Church of Sweden because this wasn’t around. It’s clearly this other thing. This much older Catholic church, now they have a moral demand to convert, and if they refuse at that point, now they’re disobeyed.

Before they were ignorant, this would become disobedience. That’s the principle. So if you think very broadly, early church, medieval church, modern church, the early Christians were aware. A lot of their audience had never heard of the gospel. The medieval church often assumed, and I think rightly at the time that their audience had heard the gospel, the modern church is much less convinced that its audience has heard the gospel because we’re also preaching to entire parts of the world that have never been Christian. So you’ll find these tonal differences. You’ll find things written in the Middle ages that seem to treat all non-Christians as intentionally non-Christians because the people they’re talking about probably were, and you’ll find earlier and later documents that don’t share that assumption because they’re writing in a different world. So just as I said at the beginning, this is a difference in pastoral approach, and you approach someone who’s like a knowing disobedient child differently than you approach someone who just literally doesn’t know.

That’s what we’re seeing. I think you do see a shift in the modern era even before Vatican two, but certainly in Vatican two. But I think you also see a shift from the early church to sort of the height of Christendom in kind of the opposite direction. But all of that is just a tonal response to the world that they’re operating in. Not a difference in actual doctrine, the core doctrine, everyone must be a part of the church, but there might be some who innocently don’t realize that they need to be part of the church that’s been proclaimed in one way, shape, or form for 2000 years, because that’s just basic Christianity. So where does that leave us for real? This time with the Great commission, we should invite people because we are told by Jesus, go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them.

So notice we’re bringing them into the church. We’re not just making them students of Christ, we’re making them disciples, but also baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit teaching them to observe all that I’ve commanded you. So notice there’s actual commandments. People have to observe, and then we’re remembering, oh, I’m with you always to the close of the age. Well, who is he with explicitly? He’s with the church. So that’s our call. We don’t have the knowledge. We don’t have the ability to say who is and isn’t going to heaven. We do have the ability to say what everyone should be doing, and that is being in one flock with Jesus Christ as the head of the flock, and we know where to find the flock created by Christ because we can see it with our own eyes.

Okay, last thing. I know this is a long episode, but you’ll sometimes hear an opposite objection. It won’t be the Catholic church is bad because the Catholic church teaches that non-Catholics can’t be saved. Instead, it’ll be the objection. The Catholic church is bad because Catholics themselves can’t be saved because Catholics aren’t true Christians. So now the anathema is going against Catholics and saying, you actually have to be in schism from the church or else you can’t be saved. What would we say in response to that? I have a video right here answering that for Shameless Popery, I’m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.