"Outside the Church there is no salvation" - what this means

I was just reading a post by someone on this dictum and the Catholic Church's teaching on it earlier today. It was the usual skeptical vitriol, alleging that the Church had totally changed her view on this. First, a bit about why this phrase would have ever gained any currency.

This conviction was especially prominent in the writings of St. Cyprian of Carthage (see Letter 73). That's not an accident. While it's true that the Romans were bothered by the fact that Christians would not participate in the required sacrifice to the Roman gods (Romans wouldn't have been bothered by someone's participating in both Christian and Roman rituals), it's also true that the exclusivism noted in the title to this entry springs to some extent from an environment in which the Christian faith had been persecuted.

Picture someone suffering and dying for the faith while another person who claims the same faith simply waltzes up to the Roman authorities and performs the required sacrifice. The martyr or confessor at that point has a right to feel that this is not a true Christian conviction. The opposition to idolatry is already a part of the basic Christian belief. Thus, if one is going to die for her faith, the benefits of that faith had better be the kinds of things one can't get anywhere else. Otherwise, upon notification that her religion was being persecuted, a person should simply switch to one that isn't being persecuted.

For a Christian to claim to be a pluralist in the style of John Hick is thus, in my view, simply a mistake that fails to honor the legacy of the early persecuted Church. On the other hand, another conviction developed early on in the Church, also from out of persecution, namely, that death through martyrdom, even prior to the ordinary baptism through water, could only bring honor (and, indeed, salvation) to the martyr. How could this be if the person had not yet formally entered into the Church outside of which there is no salvation? The answer came back that this was to be regarded as an exceptional case that came to be called the "baptism of blood."

Another movement in the early Church is important to track. While many at various stages postponed baptism for a variety of reasons (some not so honorable), the tradition of the Church would have been to baptize at a very particular time (as when the catechumen is baptized at the Easter Vigil, after having prepared for some months at least). Now, suppose that this catechumen simply dies of natural causes while formally a part of the catechumenate. Clearly, this person has expressed a desire to enter into the Church through baptism, but simply has not yet done so. In this case, the Church regarded the grace of Christ to be efficacious through the desire for the sacrament. Thus, the "baptism of desire." Now, the next question to ask is what level of desire is sufficient to qualify for the baptism of desire? This is a thorny question, and I don't propose to answer it, except to say that John Paul II was happy enough to talk about the "implicit faith" that he invoked while discussing Gandhi. Vatican II is important in this context. See Lumen Gentium, 16 at http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_const_19641121_lumen-gentium_en.html.

Thus, there are a few things that the Church always needs to honor: 1) the experience of the martyr who dies for a faith she can't get anywhere else, 2) the justice of God, and 3) the accidental nature of human death, even while a person has the intention of being baptized. While the Church has defined the necessity of baptism on good scriptural grounds, one must remember that it the Church is also the custodian of God's revelation and how it must be interpreted, which includes teachings of the past. While infallible teachings cannot be repealed, they are not bound to the context in which they were originally articulated.