In 1552 in Yamaguchi, Japan, a group of recent Christian converts confronted St. Francis Xavier with a difficult question. The missionary had taught them that no one could be saved without faith in Jesus Christ, but their ancestors had died before Xavier’s arrival. Was there no way to get them out of hell? The saint replied that there was not. The Christians should dedicate themselves more fervently to following the Gospel, he said, to escape their ancestors’ unhappy fate.
It is a jarring answer to modern ears, dubbed “harsh and merciless” by one of Xavier’s biographers. In fact, the letter Xavier wrote to his European confreres describing the incident suggests some unease with the answer—not doubting its accuracy but troubled by the distress of his Japanese friends. While I think the criticism of Xavier is unfair, I, too, would fault his answer.
Fast-forward to 2018 and a very different kind of evangelist. Sitting down for an interview with the conservative journalist and devout Jew Ben Shapiro, Bishop Robert Barron faced what Shapiro described as “the most awkward of the awkward questions”: whether someone who didn’t believe in Christ could get into heaven.
Bishop Barron responded with an enthusiastic yes, saying that the Second Vatican Council “very clearly” teaches that even atheists can be saved. Christ is the “privileged route” to salvation, he claimed, but following your conscience is enough. He too was criticized, not always fairly, for seeming to ignore the words of Jesus: “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (Jn 14:6). I am a big admirer of Bishop Barron—as I am of Francis Xavier—but I found his answer just as flawed, if in the opposite direction.
Conventional wisdom
The flaw in Xavier’s answer is easier to see. He is right that faith in Christ and salvation are inseparable. To understand why this is the case, we must remember that faith means more than intellectual assent to propositions. This rather narrow sense of faith—believing that something is true—is mostly a product of the Reformation and Enlightenment. For the early church, faith implied a particular kind of relationship. Reasoning had its part, but for the church fathers, faith was something one received in baptism, and it couldn’t be separated from the new way of being in relationship with God (and others) anchored by the sacramental life.
At the same time, Catholic theology has generally rejected the doctrine of double predestination, that is, that some people are inevitably destined to hell. This is where Xavier’s answer goes wrong: It implies the existence of a category of people for whom salvation is in principle impossible. Nothing in revelation requires us to believe that salvation must be easy, likely or equally accessible to all, but it cannot be categorically impossible. Xavier seems to close the door on even the possibility of salvation for those Japanese who died before the arrival of the Gospel.
Where Bishop Barron’s answer falls short is in downplaying what Xavier got right. Christ is no “privileged route” to salvation, whatever that means. He is simply the way. This is because heaven is not a Good Place—as the TV show of that name might have it—but a particular type of relationship with Christ. Salvation is communion with Christ.
Bishop Barron rightly notes that grace, the commandments and conscience all have their origin in Christ—as does everything in creation. But the church fathers universally recognized that if conscience were sufficient for salvation, revelation would have been superfluous. Just as no one can be in principle excluded from salvation, so we cannot propose alternate paths to get there. The church’s message is not “Christ or something that might work better for you,” but simply Christ. Affirming both of these principles is what makes the questions posed by Yamaguchi’s Christians and Ben Shapiro so hard.
None of this, then, is to knock either Bishop Barron or St. Francis Xavier. Both gave answers to very tough questions that represented the conventional wisdom of their respective ages. But conventional wisdom is often more conventional than wise, because it fails to recognize the unspoken—but sometimes flawed—assumptions that allow it to go unchallenged.
Baptism and salvation
How and why Catholic thought has shifted from the early church’s thick understanding of faith to the muddled relativism of the late 20th century is a fascinating and complex story, one that I explore in my book Baptism of Desire and Christian Salvation. Here it will have to suffice simply to suggest that a better answer to these tough questions about salvation is possible.
That answer, I would argue, must make use of the ancient doctrine of baptism of desire. Such an approach is more theologically sound than those that emerged from the scholasticism of Xavier’s day or the religious insecurity of the late 20th century. Both elements of the doctrine—baptism and desire—are necessary to maintain the tension in Christian teaching lost by the alternatives outlined above.
Focusing on the necessity of baptism for salvation came naturally enough for the early church (see Jn 3:5), and predates principles that draw more attention today, such as the dogma “outside the church there is no salvation.” Baptism is a sacrament, a sacred action, so what it means is more open-ended than a verbal statement of belief. St. Paul explained baptism as participation in the dying and rising of Jesus (Rom 6:3-5).
Theologians living around Xavier’s time argued in endless circles about the minimum necessary beliefs someone had to profess in order to be saved, but this whole approach—searching for the minimum—is wrong. The sacrament’s “meaning,” by contrast, can never be put fully into words because it involves more than simply believing—it is a participation in the paschal mystery. Any attempt at reductionism—identifying an alternate or more abstract path than baptism—necessarily offers something less. This changes what salvation means.
Certain beliefs, to be sure, might indicate an orientation toward salvation in its fullness, but these are only that—indicators. What ultimately counts, the content of the Christian proclamation, is the final goal—full immersion, as it were, in the paschal mystery.
Some might argue that it would be less cumbersome to speak of the generic principles that baptism represents—to proclaim, with the Beatles, that all you need is love. But the easiness of such answers is precisely what makes them wrong. Generalities lose the incarnational specificity of the Christian sacraments and become pop songs. Put another way, we have no right to promise alternatives to the fullness of Christian revelation. The concreteness of the sacrament protects it against such reductionism. It also makes our participation in God’s action accessible in a concrete human act.
Recognizing the irreducibility of the Christian proclamation and the rites that embody it might save us from Bishop Barron’s error, but what about Xavier’s? This is where desire comes in. Starting with St. Ambrose of Milan in 392, Christian thinkers have recognized that if, say, a catechumen who desired to be baptized died before receiving the sacrament, he would still attain salvation.
The doctrine does not propose an alternative to the sacrament because it is baptism, not something else, that one desires. This means, of course, that whatever prevents one from receiving baptism by water must be outside of one’s control. The omission of the sacrament cannot be the result of obstacles one erects oneself—fear of the consequences of conversion or attachment to sinful behavior, for example—or because one has only a passing interest in Christianity.
Implicit desire
In a case like the unevangelized ancestors of Xavier’s converts, this means that we must speak of implicit desire. An implicit desire is a desire—or, more likely, a combination of desires—that necessarily implies baptism even if someone is not able to put a name on this endpoint. In the Gospel, Simeon yearns to see the Messiah before he dies without yet knowing that the Messiah will be Jesus, Mary’s son. His desire allows him to recognize the Lord when he does arrive (Lk 2:25-35). It is hard to maintain a meaningful desire for something one cannot see or even name, so the possibility of an implicit desire for baptism does not make the work of missionaries and evangelists less important.
Much more needs to be said about the admittedly subtle notion of implicit desire. The orientation it provides toward salvation is tenuous, which is why, from the apostles on, Christians have felt such urgency to see the name of Jesus proclaimed explicitly. It gives us no right to promise salvation to anyone using any means other than those revealed to us by Christ. At most, we can speak not of how one might be saved apart from baptism or Christian faith, but of whether there exist grounds for believing that someone had an implicit desire for those things.
This distinction would allow us to give a fuller answer to the Christians of Yamaguchi than what Francis Xavier offered them, while still remaining honest. We might say, for example:
Your own baptism shows the existence of desire for what Christian faith offers. This desire was certainly nurtured and channeled by the preaching of missionaries, but at least some elements of it existed within you already.
And some of those elements no doubt came from your upbringing and heritage, which means they were present at least in part among your ancestors. So, while we have no guarantee of their salvation, we have at least some grounds to believe they might have possessed an implicit desire for the faith in which you now participate explicitly. Your conversion is testimony on their behalf.
Ultimate answers
As for Ben Shapiro, he strikes me as the sort of man capable of handling a few disagreements. I find his religious observance admirable, but I also wouldn’t hide the fact that our respective religious commitments involve different concepts of salvation. In Christian belief, salvation is not an external reward for good behavior but living in communion with Jesus Christ. Anything less than this need not involve fiery punishments—especially for one living a commandment-abiding life—but it would miss out on that greatest good.
Shapiro might not agree—and what that means in the afterlife God will ultimately sort out—but I suspect he wouldn’t take offense at an answer that doesn’t resort to subjectivism. Shapiro, after all, is a thinker who recognizes the harm of religious indifferentism.
Some might prefer easier answers. Fidelity to Christian revelation will sometimes involve maintaining certain theological tensions and living, in specific cases, with uncertainty. The fact that no one is in principle excluded from salvation does not mean that conversion is any less necessary. By definition, salvation without conversion is not worth the effort. In fact, I admire both Bishop Barron and Francis Xavier for their efforts to spread Christianity’s salvific message. Bishop Barron’s answer to Shapiro might have seemed to offer atheists unwarranted reassurance, but his own sophisticated work to counter neo-atheist arguments would make little sense if, in the end, it proved a point of merely academic interest.
As for Xavier, the charge that his answer to the Christians of Yamaguchi demonstrates a “harsh and merciless” mindset is refuted by his life. Faced with people in peril of missing the infinite good of salvation, he did not construct an optimistic argument from the security of his European study. He gave up everything and traveled to the ends of the earth to preach the Gospel to them.
And that is a very good answer.
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