Dialogue: Does "Salvation Outside the Church" Disprove Catholic Claims (By Internal Contradiction)?

I received the following e-mail from a person who described himself as "a philosophy graduate student and a Protestant." I received permission to post it with my reply, as long as I didn't mention the person's name or e-mail. His words will be in blue.

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I have recently happened upon your site, and I find it rather interesting. You don't address (from what I can tell, . . . ) two worries that I had growing up about Catholicism. Let me try and systematize one of the arguments to make it easier for you to refute.

The Argument from Exclusivity

1. If Roman Catholicism is true, then all ecumenical councils and ex cathedra papal declarations are infallible. (True, by your own account.)

2. Some ecumenical councils and papal declarations make strong claims that there is no salvation outside of the Catholic Church. (I'm sure you're aware of the cases.)

3. The Holy Spirit is extremely active in the lives of many Protestants. (Empirical evidence)

4. 3 is evidence of their salvation. (Scriptural evidence, of which I'm sure you're aware).

5. By 1 and 2, if Roman Catholicism is true, then Protestants don't have salvation.

6. But by 4, Protestants do have salvation.

7. Therefore, by 5 and 6, Roman Catholicism is false.

My guess is that you can reply in four ways:

I. Deny 3: You can argue that much of Protestant spirituality is fake, or demonically inspired. And that if Protestants have true piety, they will be led into the Roman Church. I have encountered Catholics who believe so.

I don't deny #3 at all, nor does the Catholic Church. But plenty of Protestants believe this type of thing about Catholics.

II. Deny 4: You can argue that the Holy Spirit "tries" to win Protestants, because of God's mercy, but that if they persevere in their ignorance, they are damned.

First of all, we don't know who will be saved and who won't be, since we don't know the future. Catholics don't believe that the Bible teaches "salvation" or "justification as a one-time thing which is in the past if someone is a "real" Christian. We believe that it is a process. See my papers:

Assurance of Salvation

Catholic Exegesis of Biblical Passages Allegedly Suggesting Absolute Assurance of Salvation

"Certainty" of Eternal Life? (1 John 5:13 and John 5:24)

Reflections on the Origin and Nature of "Instant" Salvation

III. Deny 5: You can make the typical Catholic claim that Protestants are saved despite "invincible ignorance". Perhaps they are only in venial sin due to their lack of sinful intention.

*** CLICK ON "Tolle, lege!" immediately below to finish this article ***

There is so much misunderstanding here that it is difficult to know where to begin, so I'll just answer more fully below.

IV. Deny an Implicit Premise:

There arefalse premises here, ambiguous statements, and an "either/or" approach that is unnecessary. This is more along the lines of how I can defeat these objections.

That Protestants aren't Catholics.

They obviously are not, formally speaking. But they are "members" in a sense insofar as they are baptized and therefore incorporated into the Body of Christ.

Some more liberal Catholics argue that Protestants are inside the Roman Church due to their baptism,

That is not "liberal"; it is orthodox Catholic teaching. Hence, Vatican II:

For men who believe in Christ and have been properly baptized are put in some, though imperfect, communion with the Catholic Church . . . all who have been justified by faith in baptism are incorporated into Christ; they therefore have a right to be called Christians, and with good reason are accepted as brothers by the children of the Catholic Church.

(Decree on Ecumenism, Chapter I, 3)

but that they're just confused about their affiliation.

People are confused about a lot of things, but affiliation is not usually one of them. They are what they are; part of my job is to convince Protestants that the fullness of Christian faith and the apostolic deposit resides uniquely in the Catholic Church. The more a Protestant knows about this, the more responsible he will be to make a decision pro or con. Only God can finally determine if this is willful rebellion or invincible ignorance, and who will be saved or not. Human beings simply don't have that knowledge.

I think there are problems for all four replies. Reply I seems rather monstrous, as I hope you'll agree.

I do.

Reply II seems nearly as monstrous. I don't think there needs be much concern about these. I mention them only because they have been presented to me, and from the tone of your site, I thought it within the realm of plausible possibility that you would take these replies seriously.

The problem is that you present the choices in an excessively rigid, hyper-literalistic manner that doesn't take into account various subtleties and nuances of Catholic thought. I regard this sort of objection as almost on a par with garden-variety atheist lines like the famous, "can God make a rock so big that He can't lift it?" In other words, the questions themselves miss crucial aspects and distinctions or betray fundamental misunderstandings from the outset.

God is merciful and just, and He judges people based on what they know and what they do with true knowledge and revelation about Him: how they act upon it. For example, in every passage I have found about judgment day or the last days when all will be judged, people were judged based on what they did: not simply because they cited a "correct formula" such as "I'm saved by faith alone" or "TULIP is the gospel" or "I accepted Jesus into my heart as personal savior." From the text itself, all we know is that Jesus judged them on their actions.

See my paper: "Apostate" Churches, Deceptive Catholics, and Desperate Judgment Day Pleas: My Non-Encounter With Protestant Apologist Matt Slick. We also know from Romans 2:6-16 (RSV) how God looks at believers who have different degrees of knowledge or ignorance:

6: For he will render to every man according to his works:
7: to those who by patience in well-doing seek for glory and honor and immortality, he will give eternal life;
8: but for those who are factious and do not obey the truth, but obey wickedness, there will be wrath and fury.
9: There will be tribulation and distress for every human being who does evil, the Jew first and also the Greek,
10: but glory and honor and peace for every one who does good, the Jew first and also the Greek.
11: For God shows no partiality.
12: All who have sinned without the law will also perish without the law, and all who have sinned under the law will be judged by the law.
13: For it is not the hearers of the law who are righteous before God, but the doers of the law who will be justified.
14: When Gentiles who have not the law do by nature what the law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they do not have the law.
15: They show that what the law requires is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness and their conflicting thoughts accuse or perhaps excuse them
16: on that day when, according to my gospel, God judges the secrets of men by Christ Jesus.

Reply II is "monstrous" mainly because you have presented it in such a simplistic fashion (a straw man, at least to some extent). This is not how Catholics analyze these issues. We believe that the Catholic Church possesses the fullness of Christianity and that ideally all Christians should become Catholics; but it doesn't follow that if they don't, they are all damned, or that the Church has taught this. What is taught (properly understood) is that the Catholic Church is involved somehow in the salvation of every saved person. They don't have to necessarily be aware of that, just as every person who is saved does not necessarily have to hear the gospel or know about Jesus Christ Himself. Yet if they are saved it was only because of Jesus.

I bet you’ll reject IV,

Nope; quite the opposite; there are all sorts of false notions and premises in your scenario.

at least on the grounds that you seem to think Protestantism is exceedingly pernicious.

Heavens no. What in the world would make you think that? I don't believe that at all. I think that all forms of Protestantism contain serious errors. But that is not the same as saying that they are evil or "pernicious." I see it as Protestantism being "very good" and Catholicism being "much better" or "best". It's not "evil vs. good." I suggest you read a few of my papers, such as:

How Catholics View Protestants

My Respect for Protestants

Protest Against Anti-Protestantism

I have hundreds of Protestant links on my website. My favorite writer is C.S. Lewis, and I maintain the largest Lewis links-site on the Internet. That could hardly be the case if I were anti-Protestant. I hear a similar bum rap sometimes, to the effect that I am anti-Luther. I have written some strong criticisms of him, to be sure, but I don't hate or despise the man, and in fact, I have written no less than sixteen papers where I either defended his view or his person or took a neutral stance towards it, as you can see on my Luther and Lutheranism page. For example, in my paper, The Ghost of Martin Luther Interviews Bishop James White About Dastardly, Wascally Luther-Basher Dave Armstrong, I portray Luther as saved, and he is treated affectionately and not disrespectfully at all. I could go on and on about this. It's simply untrue that I am "anti-Protestant".

Further, the statements I've seen seem to explicitly name Protestants as those outside the Church. Second, many Protestants ardently insist they are outside of the Church, although that may be irrelevant.

They may be formally declared outside the Church (which is what excmmunication does, but this is not the same thing as being damned. The Church has not declared that excommunicates like Luther are damned. That's why I am free to portray him, in charity, as possibly saved, in my fictional dialogue. See my paper: The Catholic Understanding of the Anathemas of Trent and Excommunication.

I've heard some Catholics argue that the Councils only mean "true Protestants" like the founders of Protestantism – Luther, Calvin, etc. I’ve even heard some claim that there is no one corresponding to the counciliar term "Protestant" and so the set of Protestants is empty.

The Council of Trent did not name any particular Protestant. See the above paper.

The "empty set" option seems to bawderize the meaning of the councils in a dishonest way. I think you'll agree.

The Councils don't say that anyone is damned, so it is a moot point. If we're talking about the possibility that those formally outside the Church can possibly be saved, our answer is, "absolutely!" That's not our game, to figure out who is saved and who isn't. This is the game that many Protestants play, but not us. But even John Calvin said that we cannot know who is in the elect or not.

I also bet that you'll be concerned about the "original Protestants" reading. It's not really true to the intention of the text either. Although you might not think that original intent is a decisive factor for analyzing counciliar statements. I'd be interested to know your view.

My view is that councils deal with heresy, not who is saved and not saved. The two questions are quite distinct. Even if someone believes something objectively wrong (a heresy), there is a separate question of their subjective culpability in so doing, which involves a host of variables.

Let's focus then on Reply III. I think this is in line with God making "extraordinary means" available to Protestants.

Of course. He does that with everybody.

Here is where my reply is probably weakest. It seems to me that this reply is peculiar. Many Protestants call directly on the name of Jesus; they spend their whole lives loving Him and seeking Him. Are they really let in on God's Plan B?

If they are saved, it'll be on the basis that anyone else is saved: by God's grace, in faith, and because of some evidence of sanctity and good works which must follow if true saving faith is present. We don't frown on anything true in Protestantism (and there are tons of things that are true); we simply claim that we are the Church That Christ Founded, which possesses the fullness of Christian revelation and developed theology: handed down from Jesus to the apostles. We think that if someone truly knows that Catholicism is true (all of it: not pick and choose, cafeteria-style "Catholicism"), and rejects it, then he cannot be saved, because he would then be responsible for knowing the truth and deliberately rejecting it. But one can say that about so few Protestants, in my experience. They are so ignorant about so many things in our faith. I certainly was myself, and I was an evangelical far more educated than the average in my own faith and belief-system.

You may reply and say, "But the virtuous of other religions are let in on Plan B too, or so we hope. That's enough for Protestants."

If they have passed the "test" of what we see in Romans 2, of course they can be saved. Only God knows these things, so why do we spend so much time wrangling about it? It's like the debate over predestination and free will that people go endlessly on and on about. God knows who are His and who aren't. He knows His sheep.

I don't think it is. Protestants are simply too close to Roman Catholics in belief. I'm pushing a kind of weak theological liberalism here. It seems that those people who maintain explicit, by name relationship with Christ are saved by his own set conditions. If the Counciliar statements

The correct word is "conciliar," by the way.

were correct, then it seems like Jesus would have been far more concerned to emphasize membership in an explicit organization.

Jesus and Paul were very concerned about correct doctrine, and taught that it would be found in one Church and on Tradition. We believe that is identical with the Catholic Church. So yes, both of them would want all Christians to be in this one Church, with the fullness of truth. That doesn't mean that membership there is the be-all and end-all of salvation. There has been tons of disinformation and sectarianism so that people can't tell the difference between different Christian groups and woldn't even know how to go about resolving all the contradictory claims even if they wanted to. God knows all this. See my paper: Compelling Biblical Evidence Against Denominations and "Primary vs. Secondary" Doctrines.

You may reply to this by saying that He emphasized baptism, which is the sacrament which makes one a member of the Church.

I would. Everyone who professes Christ (or children of same) should be baptized at the earliest available opportunity.

But then we're back to Reply IV, I think. Protestants are just confused/stupid/ignorant Catholics, which seems to pay them a might disrespect.

Why does it have to imply "disrespect" to simply believe that one's own view of Christianity is true (or fullness of truth) and others are incorrect to various degrees? We all do this. Every Protestant who understands his faith disagrees strongly with many tenets of Catholicism (and of Orthodoxy). But that doesn't require any condescension or hostility. I didn't disrespect Catholics before I converted. I had extreme respect for Mother Teresa and Pope John Paul II and Catholics I met in Operation Rescue; many saints, etc. All of this existed side-by-side with a doctrinal disagreement. So why is it so disconcerting that one Church makes a claim to "ecclesiological preeminence," so to speak?

But I do think that there is an awful lot of thinking in Protestant circles, that I weould call relativistic or postmodern, whereby it is casually assumed that there is no one Christiuan truth that can be found. It is considered an impossible task, so that if someone makes this claim, they must have some severe thinking problems. This has severe problems of being reconciled with how the Bible views such matters. I wrote about this in my paper, Response to Rev. Michael Pahls on "Theological Humility" and the Protestant "Non-Quest" Regarding Christian Certainty.

I hope my reflections have been helpful.

I think they were challenging and provided a lot of food for thought. If you would like to discuss this or something else further, feel free. I enjoyed this a lot. Thanks!

For more general treatments of the overall question, see:

Dialogue on "Salvation Outside the Church" and Alleged Catholic Magisterial Contradictions (Particularly in the Middle Ages; With Emphasis on St. Thomas Aquinas's Views)

The Catholic Church's View of Non-Catholic Christians (Karl Adam)

On Salvation Outside the Catholic Church (+ Blog Discussion) (Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J.)

A Defense of the Ecumenical Gathering at Assisi (Ecumenism in St. Thomas Aquinas) (Fr. Alfredo M. Morselli)

A Response to (and Befuddlement Over) Criticisms of the Second Ecumenical Gathering at Assisi (2002) (Mark P. Shea)