Chapter 14 of Vatican II's Lumen Gentium acknowledged again the traditional teaching that it is necessary for the salvation of every individual to be a part of the Catholic Church. On the other hand the Council expressed in the same document in chapter 16 its hope for the salvation of those non-believers, who without their own fault are ignorant of the gospel, and who nevertheless seek God with a sincere heart, and, moved by grace, try in their actions to do his will as they know it through the dictates of their conscience.
These two passages of Lumen Gentium mark the parameters for the question of the salvation of non-believers, and they are also the starting point for the study on the salvation of atheists by Stephen Bullivant. According to him the primary purpose of his study is to explore and to explicate the meaning of these two passages and to ask and eventually to answer the question how it is possible for an atheist, within the parameters of Catholic theology, to be saved. It is important for Bullivant to ask his question from the perspective of Catholic dogmatic theology and he emphasizes explicitly his own roots in Catholic orthodoxy. This seems to be necessary because of some debates in Catholic theology about various pluralistic concepts on salvation, which have been criticised by the Holy See.
Bullivant starts his study with two clarifications. First, he defines salvation as a process of transforming a human being on his way to the final encounter with God, which does not end with death, but which continues in purgatory, and secondly he gives a rather broad definition of an atheist as someone who is without any belief in God or the gods. The second chapter deals then explicitly with the theological tradition of the question of salvation of atheist, starting from Pius IX to Vatican II. Crucial for the further development of the question is the position of Pius IX, who, after again stating the necessity of the church for salvation, declared in1854 in his encyclical Singulari Quadam that ‘it is to be held for certain that they who labour in ignorance of the true religion, if this ignorance is invincible, are not bound by any fault in this matter in the eyes of the Lord’. Bullivant is able to show that the optimism of Vatican II regarding the possibility of the salvation of non-believers is not an exception, but part of the continuity of the theological and doctrinal development of the teaching of the Church. With Joseph Ratzinger he is able to say that the theoretical possibility of the salvation of non-believers and non-Christians is certain and therefore only the question remains how salvation is actually possible for atheists.
For this purpose Bullivant examines various different theologians, including Schillebeeckx, De Lubac, Daniélou, Congar and Maritain, and he comes to the conclusion that all of their conceptions have in common the idea of an implicit, unconscious or anonymous faith on the side of the non-believer, which eventually should enable the non-believer to be saved. This means that the concept of the ‘anonymous Christian’ of Karl Rahner, which is then discussed be Bullivant in the subsequent chapter, is not as exceptional and unique as generally believed. The focus of his critique of Rahner's conception is on the lack of clarity of unconscious or implicit faith. He refers in his critique also to the position of Augustine DiNoia, who rejects the idea of an implicit belonging to the church and who instead suggests the idea of a post-mortem conversion of the non-believer. An important aspect of the salvation of non-believers is nevertheless, according to traditional theology, the ignorance of the non-believer of the gospel. Bullivant proposes, with reference to the theory of social structures of plausibility of Luckmann and Berger, a rather broad concept of ignorance, which would allow atheists in our secularized society to be regarded as ignorant of the gospel. His own conception is based, on one side, on some aspects of the theology of Gavin D'Costa, especially his concept of Christ's decent into hell and the idea of the continuing possibility of the ‘limbus patrum’ for the non-evangelized. A conversion of atheists in purgatory without any traces of their way to God in their life is, on the other side, not enough. This leads him in chapter 5 to Matthew 25, 31–46 and the statement of Jesus Christ that whatever someone did to the least ones he had done to him. In their work for the poor, even the atheists encounter Christ, as Bullivant points out with references to the spirituality of Mother Teresa. Under the influence of grace the atheist strives therefore in his moral acts to salvation. The necessary incorporation into the Church and the baptism on the other side happens post-mortem in purgatory, parallel to the evangelization of the dead in Christ's descent to hell. But not every atheist will be saved, according to Bullivant, but only those who have endeavoured to lead good and moral lives. Bullivant tries to avoid any ideas of the apokatastasis, but he is also aware of a possible accusation of Pelagianism, which he tries to get around by emphasizing the importance of the presence of grace already in the work of the non-believer.
The work of Stephen Bullivant is a remarkable study on the topic of the possible salvation of atheists, which tries to avoid the traps of post-modern relativism. Nevertheless three questions remain for a debate with the approach of Bullivant. The first question is just a short remark, because while Bullivant discusses the concept of Rahner's ‘anonymous Christian’ at length, he only touches the thinking of Von Balthasar, whose idea of Christ descending into hell in order to live his solidarity with the dead in all its consequences, raised some questions about the possible idea of the apokatastasis in the theology of Von Balthasar. A more comprehensive discussion with this approach is unfortunately missing in the work of Bullivant. The second question is related to the critique of the concept of implicit faith in atheists. Bullivant rejects on the one hand this idea as problematic, but on the other hand he has to refer to this idea himself, when he introduces his own interpretation of Matthew 25, which requires the implicit presence of God's grace in the works of the atheists. In this sense it seems to me that the idea of an implicit presence of God's grace in every human being and his works is absolutely necessary, in the sense of a transcendental presupposition of human existence as such, but in order to avoid any incorporation of atheists as anonymous Christians against their consent, it is necessary to emphasize the absolute free character of the act of faith. This leads to the last remark on the work of Bullivant. An atheist is not just someone who does not believe in God; he also rejects the whole idea of eternal salvation. If, as Bullivant points out, a conversion is necessary for salvation, how does this act of faith remain a free act of the human subject if the atheist encounters God's reality in purgatory? Does the atheist really have the chance to resist and to say no to God? Apart from these minor questions the study of Bullivant shows that the question of salvation for non-believers belongs deeply to the tradition of Catholic theology, and with his own model of the ethical praxis of atheists, within the line of Matthew 25 and the spirituality of Mother Teresa, and the possibility of a later post-mortem conversion of an atheist, Bullivant succeeds in making an important contribution to the contemporary debate on atheism and Christian faith.
