note that until the twentieth century there has generally been what might be called a salvation pessimism about the salvation of non-Christians, that is, there is an assumption that because of sin non-Christians will be lost. Our recent history can be characterized by a move to a salvation optimism, which is always in danger of playing down the power of sin and exalting the power of human goodness. Doctrinally, the latter, while being a wonderful reality, is biblically insufficient for salvation: men and women cannot save themselves by their own righteousness.
Second, various early Christian intellectuals had learnt greatly from Greek philosophy and could not help but wonder at the wisdom they had found there: truths that were consonant with revelation, moral exhortation of a high order, and indeed, philosophical frameworks that allowed for the sophisticated explication of Christian revelation and for its defence against philosophical attacks. They developed three crucial theories to explain pagan wisdom: the prisca theologia (ancient theology), the praeparatio evangelica (the preparation for the gospel), and the semina verbi (the seeds of the Word). The first held that all pagan wisdom was actually an explicit or implicit unacknowledged borrowing from the Old Testament – a theory of a form of intellectual plagiarism. The latter two theories, by contrast, argued that God provided knowledge in nature and in cultures that led people to the truth of the gospel, such that it was possible to know God and find truth, goodness, and beauty outside of Christianity although these truths always derived (causally, and sometimes historically) from the Christian revelation. These truths prepared the person for salvation through cultivating the good life but they were not in themselves saving revelation – which came through Christ. These truths found their fulfilment and culmination in Christian revelation.
Third, the early Christians were faced with the question of the righteous of Israel: were they lost because they were born before the time of Christ? This was unthinkable to many of them. The saints of Israel had valid faith in God, for they partook of the very covenant which is the root upon which the Church was grafted (Rom. 11.11–24). Ideas of the justice of God (in tandem with passages like Acts 2.7; Rom. 10.6–7; Eph. 4.8–9; 1 Pet. 3.18–20) led to the notion that these righteous awaited the coming of Christ, who as the creed has it, ‘descended into hell’, where he preached salvation to those who deserved it so that they might be saved. This scenario led to the idea of the limbus patrum (the limbo of the fathers) as a kind of holding tank for the righteous who died before Christ. In the third century Clement of Alexandria and others included righteous pagans in the limbus patrum, which suggested the possibility of salvation for all persons, not just Israelites. Augustine likewise insisted on an invisible Church from the time of Abel composed of the righteous. For all these thinkers, the assumption was that after Christ came, no one was in an analogous position to these righteous gentiles and holy pre-Christian Jews.
Together, these three attitudes run throughout Christian history, leading to three widely adopted theologoumena in the modern period which are central to Catholic teaching: (1) the necessity of Christ and his Church for salvation; (2) the justice of God towards the righteous before (and obviously after) the coming of Christ, but the application was related to those before Christ; (3) the possibility of goodness, truth, and beauty being present in pagan traditions, but never in a manner equal to Christ and his sacramental presence in his Church in kind or degree. However, the modern period introduces a new hermeneutical context which contextualizes this tradition: that well until the age of discovery in the fifteenth century it was generally assumed by most theologians that after the time of Christ everyone knew the gospel. If a person was not a Christian they had explicitly rejected the truth of God. This meant that Judaism and eventually Islam (from the seventh century on) were both seen as heretical and/or schismatic movements, rather than genuinely ‘other’ as we tend to view these and other traditions today.
The Middle Ages
The age of discovery also brought on a development in doctrinal theology with the discovery of the ‘new world’ with millions of women and men who had never heard of the gospel through no fault of their own. It was difficult to rely on Thomas Aquinas’ (thirteenth-century) speculation that, were there to be a young boy brought up by wolves (and who thus had never heard the gospel), God’s justice would require that an angel would visit him or that he would have interior revelation. The evidence was generally that angels had not visited non-Christian peoples en masse and private interior revelation in such circumstances is unrecorded. New thinking was required in a new context. But note the continuity of dogmatic focus on the necessity of Christ and the Church for salvation.
Two sixteenth-century Dominicans of Salamanca, Francisco de Vitoria and Domingo de Soto, laid the seeds for later Catholic theology on this topic in two significant ways. Vitoria was outraged by the behaviour of some of the Spanish missionary conquistadores in South America and argued that unless the gospel was presented properly, without violence, threat, and coercion, both before and after its preaching, the hearers were under no obligation to accept it and could not be enslaved. This was a very radical stance, but Vitoria was not the only one to develop this insight. Bartolomé de Las Casas was also savagely critical of the Spanish military and political authorities for their clear exploitative ambitions and disregard for a basically peace-loving civilization reduced to shreds through Spain’s violent encomienda, whereby entire communities were forcibly reduced to slavery by being entrusted to Spanish conquistadores whom they were required to pay for their tuition in the Spanish language and instruction in the Catholic faith. Much of this socio-political sensitivity would mark modern Catholicism’s attention to these matters in mission work. Nevertheless, Catholics should feel shame at the activities of some Catholic missionaries in history, although that should not obscure the many blessings and benefits others brought to millions of people and various cultures. I would not be a Catholic were it not for the sixteenth-century Portuguese missionaries. Second, De Soto argued that implicit faith in Christ would suffice for those ‘who had never heard the gospel’ but who had followed the natural law evident in creation and through the use of their reason. This meant that the necessity of the Church for salvation was contextualized, while nevertheless still being viewed as binding. This position, with various qualifications, remains the official Catholic position today. Not all Catholics at the time shared these opinions.
The modern period
There are five important factors that mark the modern period that have shaped the Catholic Church’s formal teachings on our subject. First, there is the end of ‘Christendom’. Europe slowly became secularized, initially through the ‘alleged’ wars of religions whereby Catholics and Protestants slaughtered each other;8 and later through the nation-state’s overcoming of these differences through a unitary identity found in belonging to the state rather than a particular religion. The second factor that marks the modern is the profound crisis of two world wars fought in the heart of Christian Europe. Christians slaughtered each other savagely. Unsurprisingly many Europeans had no confidence in the cultural resources of their ancient religion. Many found solace in modern science that was perceived to have more authority than religions in its claims. Science also had vast instrumental power and seemed to offer possibilities of ‘redemption’ for millions of people in poverty. Others turned to ethics without religion. Some intellectuals turned to the ‘East’, which had been idealized by German Romanticism. This mythical ‘East’ seemed to offer something different from war and destruction. A third factor was the Holocaust. The slaughter of nearly six million Jews at the heart of a Christian culture raised deep questions about Christianity’s attitude to the religious ‘other’ as well as its own complicity in European anti-Semitism. A fourth factor was the critique of missions from the viewpoint of secular modernity. Many liberal Europeans saw Christian mission as culturally arrogant, failing to learn from the deep wisdom of the East, bearing responsibility for the destruction of primitive and ancient cultures, and falsely valuing Christianity over other religions. Fifth and finally, many ‘prophetic’ voices within Catholicism saw the future as requiring a deeper assimilation to modernity. This latter issue is still unresolved in the Catholic Church although Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI have developed a trenchant critique against many aspects of modernity that should certainly call into question any uncritical assimilation.9