This is the second post in my series on Gavin D’Costa, Christianity and World Religions: Disputed Questions in the Theology of Religions
As a Roman Catholic theologian, D’Costa is constrained by the doctrine of Extra Ecclesiam nulla salas – “There is no salvation outside the Church.” Catholics mean by this that the visible Roman Church is the only vehicle of salvation, although after Vatican II this is broadly interpreted. Protestants are not constrained by this doctrine in exactly the same way. A central tenet of the Reformation is that the Church is an “invisible” body based on the inner life of faith. Nevertheless, traditional Protestant teaching continues to hold that salvation is inaccessible Extra Ecclesiam – that those who are saved must belong to the Church, albeit the Church reinterpreted as an invisible body based on inward faith.
For some Christians in earlier centuries, Extra Ecclesiam was perhaps not as vexing a problem as it appears to us today. Many assumed that Christendom covered most of humanity. D’Costa recognizes the problem Extra Ecclesiam presents today: “the assumption . . . that the entire world is confronted with the gospel . . . is no longer tenable as we now know that, throughout Christian history, there have been billions of people and cultures who have not heard the Gospel.” He resolves this problem with reference to the “Limbo of the Just” and with an important move concerning the nature of participation in Christ.
The “Limbo of the Just” is a concept found in very early Christian tradition. It is rooted in the “descent” passage of 1 Peter 3:18-4:6. The early Church Fathers recognized that many apparently good and just people had lived before Christ, including the Old Testament saints and some of the Greek philosophers whom they admired. Some of these early Christian thinkers supposed that the preaching of the gospel to the dead described in 1 Peter 4:6 (“for this reason the gospel was preached even to those who are now dead”) referred to the opportunity for these pre-Christian people to recognize that the good towards which they strived in life was fulfilled in Christ. The time spent by Old Testament saints and “holy pagans” in the Limbo of the Just allowed them to expurgate their sins in preparation for coming to saving faith in Christ at the time of Christ’s descent.
For the Early Fathers, the Limbo of the Just was emptied on Holy Saturday. It was not an option for people living after the Resurrection, although the concept of an Infant’s Limbo eventually was developed to deal with the problem of unbaptized infants. However, D’Costa lists three reasons why the “Limbo of the Just” tradition might provide resources for the contemporary question of the unevangelized: (1) it explains how some people who did not know Christ in life could come to know him and his Church; (2) it unites the ontological experience of living a life marked by truth and the good with the epistemological status of knowing Christ as the source of all that is true and good; and (3) it provides for the fact that even those who are in some ways true and good before epistemically knowing Christ may require some degree of purification for sins committed in the flesh.
D’Costa does not suggest a simple restatement of the Limbo of the Just tradition with all of its ancient speculative cosmological baggage. He notes that “we must not imagine this solution as a celestial waiting room under the earth, but a conceptual theological datum based on the tradition that provides an answer uniting the ontological and epistemological to explain the case of [the salvation of the unevangelized.” This dense statement points towards another key to D’Costa’s proposal: a participatory ontology in which temporal, situated human beings participate in the life of the eternal, cosmic Christ. This participatory ontology is one way in which D’Costa explains how the descent of Christ on Holy Saturday can be effective for unevangelized people living in the dispensation of the Church, after the Resurrection.
More on participatory ontology in my next post. For now: Can we make use of a theological method in which traditions not explicitly mentioned in scripture inform our thinking? Does that fact that the early Church Fathers wrestled with the problem of “good” or “just” pre-Christian people, and devised a solution, help in your wrestling with problems such as the fate of the unevangelized? Are you surprised at how the first few generations of Christians interpreted 1 Peter 3-4?
2 replies on “D'Costa on Christianity and World Religions”
Hi David,
I posted my response to your first two posts on this here. I think this is a hugely important subject. Thanks for bringing in thoughts from the Church fathers, we don’t get enough of that in American evangelicalism, at least I don’t.