Implicit Faith, General Revelation and the State of Non-Christians

IMPLICIT FAITH, GENERAL REVELATION AND THE STATE OF NON-CHRISTIANS CHRISTIANS HAVE generally taught that membership in the Christian community is necessary for salvation.1 This teaching is not so odd as it is sometimes made to seem. Other religious communities have analogous doctrines. Theravada Buddhism, for example, teaches that Nirvana can be attained only by the following of the Excellent Eightfold Path. Religious traditions which propose specific ultimate goals for human life-as Christianity, Theravada and other major traditions clearly do-have generally not shown themselves to be indifferent about the means by which these goals are achieved. The capacities to attain and enjoy certain kinds of ends of life depend in large measure on courses of life shaped by the particular practices, values and beliefs commended by religious communities in their central doctrines. It is not from arrogance that a religious community teaches that a certain course of life is necessary for the attainment of the true aim of life, or that other courses of life can delay, divert or impede human beings who might otherwise be set on the right track. One way of making this point in Christianity has been to say that membership in the Christian community is necessary for salvation. Since Christians have also fairly consistently taught that salvation is the true aim of life for all human beings without exception and that this is willed by God, Christian theologians 1 This paper is a slightly revised version of one delivered at a University of Dallas convocation honoring St. Thomas Aquinas in 198!!. I have benefited from several clarifications offered in two papers by Dallas faculty respondents on that occasion, Mark D. Jordan of the Department of Philosophy and Peter C. Phan of the Department of Theology. 209 uo J. A. DINOIA, O.P. have historically devoted considerable intellectual energy to establishing the possibility of a hidden or virtual association with the Christian community on the part of persons who are the members of other religious communities or who profess no religious allegiances at all but nonetheless appear to be on the right track. In arguing for the possibility of a hidden affiliation of this kind, theologians ha.ve commonly relied on the presumption that the morally upright and altruistic lives of nonChristians , and perhaps even some of their communities' doctrines , express their possession of an implicit Christian faith activated by some general, extra-Christian revelation. In much the same way that explicit faith makes human beings openly confessing members of the Christian community, the disposition of implicit faith is said to constitute non-Christian persons as hidden members of the Christian community. Perhaps no more comprehensive and elaborate a version of this view has ever been offered in Christianity than the proposal advanced in our own day in Karl Rahner's theology of religions (under the tag of " anonymous Christianity ") . Such a view of the state of non-Christians has certain definite advantages. It permits Christians a measure of optimism about the prospects for salvation of countless good people who are not explicit, practicing members of the Christian community. Generally speaking, it can be claimed, such a view fosters the development of attitudes of respect for the upright lives of nonChristians and esteem for their religious traditions. But, as I shall argue in this paper, the concept of implicit faith, which is crucial to the elaboration of views of this kind, in fact poses intractable philosophical and theological difficulties when used as the basis for general descriptions of the religious (and moral) states and dispositions of non-Christian persons . These difficulties seem all the more acute in circumstances -such as those prevailing in the Catholic Church today -in which a Christian community has adopted an official policy of interreligious dialogue. Participation in interreligious dialogue demands (among other things) a readiness on the part IMPLICIT FAITH ~11 of Christians to entertain distinctive religious proposals on the part of the members of other religious communities. The idea that a non-Christian can be covertly Christian tends to lead inevitably to an inappropriate underestimation of the distinctiveness and integrity of the patterns of life fostered by other religious communities in their particular teachings. My object in...