Can someone who isn’t Christian—or even hasn’t heard of Jesus—still be saved? In this episode of Catholic Answers Live, Jimmy Akin joins Cy Kellett to explain what the Catholic Church actually teaches about the possibility of salvation for non-Christians.
Transcript:
Cy: For Jimmy Akin, a question from Chris. Who wants to know this: Can you explain what Christian non-exclusivism entails and, more importantly, what the biblical and patristic evidence is that this is an acceptable non-heretical position? I watched the Theology Unleashed videos you were in and feel like this position would change entirely how I see everyone, Christians and non-Christians also. Are there not things like the infilling of the Holy Spirit and gifts of the Holy Spirit that devotees of other religious traditions cannot experience or share in outside of explicit faith in Jesus?
Jimmy: Okay, so we got quite a number of issues there, so let me take them one at a time. Could I explain what Christian non-exclusivism entails? Sure. It’s normally called Christian inclusivism. Christian inclusivism is the idea that there are people who can be saved and go to heaven even though they’re not consciously Christian in this life. This is a position that is taught by the magisterium of the Catholic Church.
Pertaining to the second thing that is asked about, what is the biblical and patristic evidence that this is acceptable? Well, it’s something that goes all the way back. If you look, for example, in the Old Testament, there are no passages that say, “Oh, you’ve got to be a Jew in order to go to heaven.” Now, there’s really not much discussion of the afterlife in the Old Testament. I mean, it is there, but we’re not given a lot of information about it. But there are no passages that assume that non-Jewish people are damned. That’s just not there.
When we get to the New Testament, there are passages that emphasize that one needs to accept Christ, and you know, that’s important for our salvation. But there are other passages in the New Testament itself that can point to a non-exclusive understanding of that. For example, in the Book of Acts, in chapter 17, St. Paul is talking to the Areopagus in Athens, and he notes that the Athenians have been making offerings to God because he found an altar in Athens that said, “To an unknown God.” He says, “What you’ve been worshiping in ignorance, I’m now going to tell you about.”
So he acknowledged that the Athenians were worshiping God. They just didn’t know about God, but they reasoned correctly that there must be a God they were not otherwise aware of. So let’s make sure we worship him too. That was a good thing. St. Paul also talks to them about how, even though they have been led astray to worship idols, which they shouldn’t do, those were times of ignorance that God has winked at. That’s the term that’s used in Greek. It means God is overlooking those. He’s not going to hold you accountable for that, provided now that you have more knowledge, you do what you need to, which is worship Jesus.
But notice that this is implying that up to now they would have been able to go to heaven. They were worshiping God, they recognized there was a God, they were trying to worship him; they weren’t responsible for the idols they also worshiped. And God thus winked at those times. This indicates some possibilities for salvation for people who weren’t consciously Christian.
The same is true for Jewish people who never heard the message of Jesus in the first century. If Jews before the time of Christ were saved, and there were still Jews in good conscience at the time of Christ or just after the time of Christ, and they never heard the message of the Gospel, well, if they would have been saved before, they would be saved now. God’s not going to go into their souls because they’ve never heard the message of Jesus and then rip out the sanctifying grace that was already there. So it’s going to be possible for those individuals to be saved.
In Romans, at the beginning of the book, St. Paul talks about how Greeks who don’t know the law of Moses nevertheless have moral principles, which Paul refers to as the law of God written on their hearts. He says their consciences alternately accuse them or perhaps even excuse them on the day when judgment happens. So this text at least holds out a possibility that people who don’t know God’s law consciously the way Jews did may nevertheless be excused on judgment day.
This was the understanding of early Christians as well. There were a lot of early Christian authors who recognized that, you know, hey, some of the Greek philosophers got really close to Christianity. They realized that we need to live in a moral way. They realized there must be this creator God. And they’re almost like Christians before Christians, you know. What was said by some of the early church fathers was, well, these anonymous Christians, you know, people who didn’t have the name Christian but who nevertheless realized, yeah, we need, there’s a God and we need to live in a moral way. We need to live in accordance with God’s will. They were trying to live their lives according to reason.
Now, in Greek, the word for reason is Logos. Logos is also the Greek term that is translated as “Word” in John 1. So, “In the beginning was the Word,” or “In the beginning was the Logos.” And the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God. Oh, look, these Greeks are trying to live according to Logos. So even though they don’t know about Jesus, they’re still trying to live according to the Logos, and the Logos is Jesus. So they’re trying to live according to Jesus and his will, even though they haven’t been taught about Jesus. And so they also could be saved.
This is something that goes all the way back, like I said, into the Bible and into the early church. People kind of lost sight of it for a number of centuries after the evangelization of Europe because after Europe was majority Christian, it was just kind of assumed that if you weren’t a Christian, it was through your own fault. You know, you might be a Jew or a Muslim or something, but you’d heard about Jesus, and it was just kind of assumed it was your own fault if you hadn’t embraced Jesus.
Although there were other authors who said, you know, we haven’t really been treating all the Jews great, and maybe that’s part of why they haven’t accepted him. But what really changed this was the discovery of the New World. Because prior to the discovery of the New World, people would consider, well, what if someone were raised on an island or something and never heard about Jesus? They speculated, well, maybe in that case God would send an angel to preach to them and to baptize them.
Then we find the New World. There aren’t just islands; there are continents with millions of people who have never heard about Jesus. God has not been sending angels to preach the gospel to them, certainly not in very many cases. So it looks like we need to look for another solution here. That helped retrieve the idea that the early church fathers had explored about people being united to Jesus in a saving way without understanding that in this life. Just like the Greek philosophers, they would say, oh, yeah, they’re united with Jesus in a saving way because they’re trying to live according to Logos, even though they don’t have a full understanding of Logos.
The discovery of the New World helped revive that teaching, which had been part of Christian tradition. And so that’s the position of the Catholic Church today.
Now, our inquirer Chris says he watched videos I did on Theology Unleashed. Theology Unleashed is a YouTube channel run by a gentleman from down under named Arjuna Gallagher. He’s a Vaishnava, which means, effectively, he’s a Hare Krishna. So he’s a Hindu. He has had me on a few times to do dialogue about, you know, Christianity and things like that.
The Vaishnava tradition actually has quite a bit in common with the Christian tradition. They believe that there is a single God and that the essence of being in union with this God is love. That’s the most important thing. You do have personal, conscious union with God for eternity. You’re not absorbed into God or anything like that. That’s not part of the Vaishnava tradition. So Vaishnavism is a monotheistic version of Hinduism that believes in a single great creator that we are distinct from and who wants an eternal love and relationship with us. Love is the greatest of the theological virtues, just like it is in Christianity.
So there’s a lot of commonality there. One of the differences is, you know, they have reincarnation in place of purgatory. For Catholics, the way you get purified is purgatory. For them, the way you get purified is reincarnation. So that’s a difference. But in terms of some of the broader principles, they’re actually quite similar.
Chris then says, “Aren’t there things like the infilling of the Holy Spirit and the gifts of the Holy Spirit that devotees of other religious traditions cannot experience or share in outside of explicit faith in Jesus?” Here, the Catholic Church doesn’t have a teaching. It teaches that we do receive these things as part of our Christian initiation and Christian life, but it doesn’t say, and nobody else in the world ever gets them.
I think if you want to hold that, yeah, they just don’t get the infilling of the Holy Spirit or the gifts of the Holy Spirit, that’s a defensible position. That’s a position you can hold. But I also think that you could hold a position like St. Augustine and say, you know, we are bound by the sacraments, but God is not. He can give his graces to anybody he chooses.
So if God chose to have the Holy Spirit indwell a person or give someone a gift in another religion, then God could do that. It’s up to him to choose how he’s going to distribute his gifts. In fact, Jesus makes the point that it’s the Spirit who determines these things, not us. And it’s not always fully predictable.
So I would say there can be a reasonable difference of opinion here about whether and to what extent God gives spiritual gifts to non-Christians who are trying to reach out to him and please him, even if they don’t understand him fully.
Cy: Chris, thank you so much for the question. Jimmy Akin, our guest this hour and next hour. So another hour coming up of Internet Ask Me Anything. Lots of fascinating questions. Some interesting Internet names attached to those questions.