ENCYCLOPEDIA BRITANNICA ERROR: ASSUMES VATICAN COUNCIL II CONTRADICTS THE DOGMA EXTRA ECCLESIAM NULLA SALUS

The Encyclopedia Britannica states that the Roman Catholic dogma extra ecclesiam nulla salus was abandoned in the pronouncements of Vatican Council II. The article (1) is written by the controversial Protestant theologian John Hicks who advocates a Theology of Religious Pluralism even for Catholics.

The encyclopedia does not mention specifically where in Vatican Council II is there a pronouncement contrary to the dogma extra ecclesiam nulla salus.

Usually it is assumed that those saved in invincible ignorance are known explicitly to us humans and so it would be an exception to the teaching on exclusive salvation in the Catholic Church.

Now more Catholics realize that we do not know any one saved in invincible ignorance, the baptism of desire or as Vatican Council II would say ‘the seeds of the Word’, in partial communion with the Church, with a good conscience etc. These cases are known only to God and so are not exceptions to the dogma.

So it is an error for the Encyclopedia Britannica to assume that Vatican Council II has contradicted the dogma. This is the political position of many non Catholic media.-Lionel Andrades

1.

During the 20th century most Christians adopted one of three main points of view. According to exclusivism, there is salvation only for Christians. This theology underlay much of the history outlined above, expressed both in the Roman Catholic dogma extra ecclesiam nulla salus (“outside the church no salvation”) and in the assumption of the 18th- and 19th-century Protestant missionary movements. The exclusivist outlook was eroded within advanced Roman Catholic thinking in the decades leading up to the Second Vatican Council and was finally abandoned in the council’s pronouncements. Pope John Paul II’s outreach to the world’s religions may be seen as the practical application of the decisions of Vatican II. Within Protestant Christianity there is no comparable central authority, but most Protestant theologians, except within the extreme fundamentalist constituencies, have also moved away from the exclusivist position.

Since the mid-20th century many Roman Catholics and Protestants have moved toward inclusivism—the view that, although salvation is by definition Christian, brought about by the atoning work of Christ, it is nevertheless available in principle to all human beings, whether Christian or not. The Roman Catholic theologian Karl Rahner expressed the inclusivist view by saying that good and devout people of other faiths may, even without knowing it, be regarded as “anonymous Christians.” Others have expressed in different ways the thought that non-Christians also are included within the universal scope of Christ’s salvific work and their religions fulfilled in Christianity.

The third position, which appealed to a number of individual theologians, was pluralism. According to this view, the great world faiths, including Christianity, are valid spheres of a salvation that takes characteristically different forms within each—though consisting in each case in the transformation of human existence from self-centredness to a new orientation toward the Divine Reality. The other religions are not secondary contexts of Christian redemption but independent paths of salvation. The pluralist position is controversial in Christian theology, because it affects the ways in which the doctrines of the person of Christ, atonement, and the Trinity are formulated.

Christians engage in dialogue with the other major religions through the World Council of Churches’ organization on Dialogue with People of Living Faiths and Ideologies and through the Vatican’s Secretariat for Non-Christians, as well as through a variety of extra-ecclesiastical associations, such as the World Congress of Faiths. There is a National Council of Churches of Christ in the United States, and practically every state has its own similar state-level organization. A multitude of interreligious encounters have taken place throughout the world, many initiated by Christian and others by non-Christian individuals and groups.John HickEd.,Christianity