In this lucidly argued and well documented study, the product of an Oxford University doctoral dissertation, we learn that only in 1878 did the Roman Catholic Church officially take notice of the phenomenon of atheism, ‘a deadly kind of plague, which infects the inmost recesses of human society’, according to Pope Leo XIII. In 1958 Pope Pius XII was still denouncing atheism's ‘lethal tenets’. Six years later, however, in Gaudium et Spes, one of the key documents of the Second Vatican Council, not only is the rise of atheism attributed in part to reaction against deplorable behaviour by Christians, we are also assured that ‘grace is active in an invisible manner in the hearts of people of good will’, not excluding atheists. ‘Extra ecclesiam nulla salus’, the doctrine maintained by the Reformers as well as by medieval councils and theologians, changed direction. In 1779, for example, the year that a mob burned down his new chapel in Edinburgh, Bishop George Hay was at work on his classical exposition, The Sincere, Devout, and Pious Christian, in which he inveighs against ‘that latitudinarian opinion so common nowadays’, that ‘to be a member of the Church of Christ is no longer necessary’ – as if ‘a Jew, a Mahometan, a heathen, a deist, an atheist, if they live a good moral life, have an equal right to salvation with a Christian’. Highlighting this or that in such pronouncements may perhaps secure a certain continuity for those who resist the idea that a Christian doctrine, or anyway a Catholic one, can ever be reversed. It seems more natural to say, however, that, while on the traditional account no one outside the Church of Christ has a hope of salvation, no one since Vatican II is actually outside anyway, whatever they think.
On the traditional account, as Bullivant shows, the Thomistic doctrine of their ‘invincible ignorance’ could save at least some non-members of the visible Church from their otherwise inevitable doom. Better knowledge of other religious traditions began to affect Christian self-understanding, though it was well into the twentieth century before the salvation of non-believers formally became a problem for Catholic theologians. In his Catholicisme (1938), a profoundly influential book, the French Jesuit, Henri de Lubac, significantly titles a chapter ‘Salvation through the Church’, rereading ‘outside the Church you are damned’ as ‘by the Church and by the Church alone you will be saved’ – meaning, of course, exclusively the Roman Church. His colleague, Jean Daniélou, in his Holy Pagans of the Old Testament (1956), notes that, despite belonging to ‘idolatrous cults’, the Queen of Sheba and others are presented in scripture as ‘saints’. These, and similar suggestions, culminate in Karl Rahner's case for ‘degrees of membership of the Church’, extending from the explicitness of baptism to the status of ‘anonymous’ or ‘implicit’ Christianity – not always (or ever) recognised by the people of good will to whom it might be attributed.
While sympathetic, his reservations about Rahner's thesis turn Bullivant towards recent work in the theology of religions by Gavin D'Costa and a reconstruction of ‘invincible/inculpable ignorance’. He concludes with a reading of the Last Judgement (Matt 25), in which ignorance is central: rejecting any naïve salvation-by-works solution, he insists that it is pre-eminently in works of mercy on behalf of the least of his brethren that Christ (and so his Church) is encountered – and those who perform such acts in ignorance of whom they serve will be saved.
