Dr. E on False Universalism in the Church

Almost twenty years ago, the ecumenical magazine First Thingspublished 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.

Continued below.