Atheists, Christians, the Pope, and Doing Good

The headline of a recent Huffington Post article caught my eye:  “Pope Francis Says Atheists Who Do Good are Redeemed, Not Just Catholics.”  Another HuffPo article notes that “Atheists Like What They See in Pope Francis’ New Openness.”  What’s going on here?  Good things, I think.

We need to dig a bit into the homily delivered by the Pope for the Feast of Santa Rita – Patron Saint of impossible things – to understand the theological undercurrents of these remarks.

The cornerstone of the Pope’s homily is a concept of natural law:

The Lord created us in His image and likeness, and we are the image of the Lord, and He does good and all of us have this commandment at heart:  do good and do not do evil.  All of us.  ‘But, Father, this is not Catholic!  He cannot do good.’  Yes, he can.  He must.  Not can:  must!  Because he has this commandment within him.

This is not a new teaching.  Some notion of natural law has been part of Christian theology from the first century New Testament writings until today (see, for example, Romans 1:20, the locus classicus for Christian natural law thinking).  Atheists, of course, will reject the concept of a natural law implanted in universal human nature by God.  They will offer other reasons for the good that they do.  But Christian theology has always held that all human beings in their created humanness bear the image of God and have a “natural” sense of what is good.

Christian theologians, however, have often disagreed about how or whether or to what extent sinful human beings can follow the natural law.  The key question here is the effect of sin on human nature and the accessibility of God’s grace to sinful humans (again, a locus classicus is Romans 1).  We can illustrate this through two historically important Christian thinkers:  Pelagius and Martin Luther.  Pelagius held that even after sin, a human being could theoretically follow his or her created nature and obtain perfection through the natural law alone.  One of Pelagius’ concerns was to preserve human freedom to follow or not follow God.  Luther, in contrast, wrote a tract titled “On the Bondage of the Will” in which he argued that sin has erased human freedom.  A sinful human person always does evil.

Both Pelagius and Luther were more complex as thinkers than this sketch suggests.  Just as some sense of natural law has always been a part of Christian thought, so has Christian thought always recognized the weight and tragedy and depth of human sin and the utter dependence of human beings on God’s grace.  Both Pelagius and Luther – as well as St. Paul and Athanasius and Augustine and Aquinas and Calvin and Barth and many other great Christian thinkers throughout history – have wrestled with this tension.  As is always the case, distortions (“heresies,” in the historically freighted lingo) crop up when one node of a tensioned web of thought is amplified so that the web snaps. 

In this case, the nodes are human freedom and human bondage to sin.  Or, stated in more common theological terms, the nodes are “nature” and “grace.”   The tensioned web of robust Christian thought (“orthodoxy”) holds that all human beings are both (1) created morally free and accountable and (2) thoroughly sinful and utterly in need of God’s grace.

At the equilibrium point of this tension we find another passage in Pope Francis’ homily that caught the attention of the HuffPo headline writers:

The Lord has redeemed all of us, all of us, with the Blood of Christ:  all of us, not just Catholics.  Everyone!  ‘Father, the atheists?’  Even the atheists.  Everyone!  And this Blood makes us children of God of the first class!  We are created children in the likeness of God and the Blood of Christ has redeemed us all!  And we all have a duty to do good.

For a journalist unacquainted with Christian theology, as well as for many Protestant evangelicals, a statement like this sounds like bland universalism.  Many of us from evangelical backgrounds are trained to think of “redemption” as something utterly separate from our created selves that only becomes part of our experience when we forcibly take hold of it.  That is, we completely sever “nature” and “grace.”

A more careful account is that sin’s corruption of human “nature” in fact makes us into something “un-natural.”  We are not now as we are created to be.  This is one of the essential points of the Biblical story of Adam and Eve and Eden.  The literary genre of that story surely is not “literal history” (whatever that would mean), but it tells a basic truth.  We cannot, because of sin, be or become what we truly are, without God’s help.  But the help – the grace – God gives us does not erase or replace “nature.”  “Nature” is already grace-shaped.  “Nature anticipates grace,” as Aquinas said, and grace perfects nature.  Redemption, then, is not alien to who we are in our created humanity.  What is “alien,” in fact, is the separation and death and emptiness of sin.

We – evangelicals and Americans more broadly – also are accustomed to think of “redemption” to mean “who goes to heaven.”  It’s as though redemption were a magic potion on a store shelf.  We might be directed to the correct aisle and grab the bottle of potion and force the potion down our throats, or we might not.  Even if the bottle is in theory universally accessible to every shopper – indeed even if there is a voice on the PA system announcing “attention shoppers, Redemption Potion is in the bottles in aisle four” — not many find it or grab it or swallow the bitter draught.  Some in very severe Reformed traditions might even say the bottle is hidden behind other things and is only made accessible to a chosen few.  Maybe a clerk whispers in the ears of those who are chosen – “psst, check out aisle four….”  In any event, it’s all about this magic potion, which instantly transforms those who drink it from “unredeemed” to “redeemed.”

I think the Pope had a different notion of “redemption” in mind in this quote.  I think he had in mind the redemption of all creation, including human nature as something universal in which all particular human beings share.  In this sense, all human beings are already redeemed by the blood of Christ.  The defects of universal human nature were assumed by Christ and are healed in Christ.  All particular human beings are capable of doing good, since all particular humans participate in universal human nature, which Christ has healed.  And to the extent any particular human is doing good, he or she is already in some fashion participating in the new humanity, the new Adam, brought about by the faithfulness of Christ. 

This concept is of course contrary to hard-line Reformed theologies that suggest the “good” done by non-Christians is only a sort of “civil good” and not genuine good.  But it is, I believe, thoroughly consistent with scripture and the broad Christian tradition, and it is a truth recognized by most Protestants today outside some narrow circles.  At the very least, God’s prevenient grace allows every human being to know and do the good to some extent.   Those of us within the Church, in fact, ought to be the first to acknowledge how far we regularly fall short in doing good, even with the benefits of regular Christian worship and sacramental life.

Does this mean that every particular human being is “going to heaven?”  No.  The freedom available to us because of Christ’s victory over sin and death remains contingent on our participation by faith.  We are free to reject the freedom of Christ and to accept instead the bondage of sin.  And in Catholic theology, along with the broad tradition of Christian thought, it is clear that this centrally involves the freedom to respond or not respond to the gospel of Jesus Christ as it is made known to us.  But, broadly speaking, Catholic theology is much more reticent to claim knowledge of precisely how God reveals Himself to others and precisely how others are or are not responding to God’s grace.  It may be that every atheist is beginning to respond and will finally respond “yes” to Christ, or it may not.  It may be that every professing Christian has expressed and will express a fundamental “yes” to Christ, or it may not.  Scripture suggests that only God finally knows the wheat from the tares, the sheep from the goats.

Does this then mean that anyone can “earn” heaven by “doing good?”  Again, no – and I don’t think the Pope would say so.  We are “justified” by faith, not by works.  Catholic, Orthodox, or Protestant, this is a basic and beautiful truth of the Gospel.  But the scriptural content of “justification” involves being made “just” – not only in name or by judicial declaration, but in fact.  We are made just only as a free gift of God’s grace made available to us by the faithfulness of Christ in his death and resurrection.  To accept that gift means, by the power of the Holy Spirit, gradually being made into a person more like Christ.  It means “abiding” in Christ, like a branch on a vine (John 15).  It means participating in the loving life of the Triune God.

The Pope’s conclusion is also important because it reflects this holistic notion of justification and redemption:

And this commandment for everyone to do good, I think, is a beautiful path towards peace. If we, each doing our own part, if we do good to others, if we meet there, doing good, and we go slowly, gently, little by little, we will make that culture of encounter: we need that so much. We must meet one another doing good. ‘But I don’t believe, Father, I am an atheist!’ But do good:  we will meet one another there.

Notice that “redemption” in this picture is about making culture and meeting one another – starting here and now!  It is not only about getting to heaven someday.  And notice that this redemptive construction of culture does not, and cannot, happen all at once.  I love the notion of creating culture “gently, little by little.”  How often I fail that ideal!  In a world where grave violence persists, it is not always possible to go “gently” (I am thinking at the moment of efforts to combat human trafficking and child pornography).  Nor does going “gently” mean avoiding clear articulation of differences or eschewing evangelism.  But in this process of recognizing the genuine “good” done by the other, maybe this gift of gentleness – which, after all, is among the particular fruits of the Holy Spirit (Gal. 5:23) – can be realized.