Dr. E on False Universalism in the Church

The Catholic Thing

By Casey Chalk
Almost twenty years ago, the ecumenical magazine First Things published an article by the great American theologian Cardinal Avery Dulles entitled "Who Can Be Saved?" After a history of Christian discussion of this question, the print edition of the article abruptly ended with the phrase "Who knows." In the full version, available on the magazine's website, Dulles ends by arguing that "adherents of other religions," and even atheists can be saved by the grace of God, "if they worship God under
some other name and place their lives at the service of truth and justice." Back then, as a rigid Calvinist seminarian, I interpreted the magazine's error as a form of divine intervention against a soteriological heresy.
Since then, I've very much warmed to the writings of Cardinal Dulles (his book on the magisterium is excellent), though I retain a certain skepticism towards the idea that an atheist could "worship God under some other name" and thus be saved.
Besides the obvious issue with the very definition of an atheist, what name might that be? Even if His Eminence aimed only to describe what might under very unusual circumstances be in the realm of possibility for someone suffering invincible ignorance, how can this be squared with Catholic teaching that salvation requires the gift of faith? And why, in a time of increased unbelief and even antagonism towards Catholicism, would we make excuses for people who need the Gospel?
I'm not sure how theologian (and sometime TCT contributor) Eduardo Echeverria would react to Dulles. He shares my concerns about a certain ecumenical approach, increasingly popular in certain Catholic circles, that so downplays differences between religious differences that the claims of the Church are no longer viewed as absolute.
His concerns about relativism serve as a backdrop to his new book, Jesus Christ, Scandal of Particularity: Vatican II, a Catholic Theology of Religions, Justification, and Truth, a collection of previously published essays.
"Religious relativism, namely, the idea that all religions are equally vehicles of salvation," writes Echeverria, "has become 'ever more common.'" This demands a reassertion of the "definitive and complete character of the revelation of Jesus Christ," according to the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith's 2000 document, Dominus Iesus.
One of the qualities I admire most about Echeverria's scholarship is his irenic approach to the Protestant tradition from which he once came. His writing is peppered with citations from a diverse group of Protestant thinkers: Robert W. Jenson, Herman Ridderbos, Peter Leithart, Paul Helm, Paul Ricoeur, G. C. Berkouwer, Wolfhart Pannenberg, Alistair McGrath, and Kevin Vanhoozer among them.
Few Catholic academics demonstrate such a familiarity with Protestant scholarship, and fewer still are the Protestants knowledgeable about Catholicism (Carl Trueman is a notable exception).
Echeverria also employs an impressive diversity of Catholic sources in favor of his arguments regarding the possible salvation of non-Christians. Lumen Gentium §14, for example, explicitly states that faith, baptism, and the Church are necessary for salvation.
Citing Ralph Martin's analysis of Vatican I, Echeverria notes that one of the necessary conditions of salvation for the invincibly ignorant is "that non-Christians seek God [my emphasis] with a sincere heart." Rejecting the universalist teachings of such thinkers as Bernard Lonergan, S.J., Echeverria argues that accessibilism - which is the hope that God's salvation in Christ is present for all, but not that non-Christian religions can be instrumental in salvation - best aligns with magisterial
teaching and Catholic tradition.
There are good reasons to repudiate universalism. The Council of Trent, for example, declares that although Christ died for all, "still not all do receive the benefit of his death," while Aquinas argues: "Because the price of his blood is sufficient for the salvati...