Historical Background
Cyprian of Carthage, facing schism in the third century, taught that there is no salvation outside the church, a sentence the tradition carried for a millennium and a half, applied by Rome to itself in Unam Sanctam (1302) and by each communion in turn. The Reformers distinguished the visible church, mixed and fallible, from the invisible church of the elect, and confessed the visible church as the ordinary means of salvation while denying that God is bound to it. Vatican II's Lumen Gentium (1964) taught that the church of Christ subsists in the Catholic Church while affirming real elements of sanctification outside her visible structure. Karl Barth's generation reframed the question around the community as the provisional representation of God's purpose for the world.
Scripture References
- Acts 2:38-47
- Ephesians 4:4-6
- 1 Timothy 3:15
- Hebrews 10:24-25
The Questions
- Does 'no salvation outside the church' still hold, and what does 'church' mean when it does? Work on this question in the Workshop
- Are the sacraments necessary means of salvation, or ordinances of obedience and assurance? Work on this question in the Workshop
- Is the church an instrument God uses, a people God saves, or the body that salvation creates? Work on this question in the Workshop
- How does the church's mission relate to the salvation of those who never hear? Work on this question in the Workshop
The Positions on This Subject
Catholic
The sacraments of the New Law cause grace by the rite itself rightly received: baptism regenerates, penance restores the fallen, and the Eucharist nourishes the life of grace unto final glory.
Baptist and Evangelical
The local church is a company of regenerated believers: conversion precedes baptism and membership, and baptism by immersion on profession of faith is the door into the visible church.
Anabaptist
The church is the gathered, voluntary community of the regenerated, entered by believers' baptism on confession of faith, and kept by mutual discipline under the rule of Christ.
Progressive
God's saving presence is at work beyond the church's borders: the traditions of the world are conversation partners in which genuine encounter with the holy occurs, and Christian claims are made in humility about what others may know of God.
Objections
The Cyprianic sentence is objected to, in its strict historical uses, for condemning the invincibly ignorant and for each communion's applying it to itself alone. Purely invisible-church accounts are objected to for making the visible community and its sacraments dispensable against the New Testament's own practice. Sacramental necessity is objected to on the thief on the cross; sacramental optionality is objected to on the ordinary pattern of Acts.
Sources
Primary: Cyprian of Carthage, On the Unity of the Church (251); Second Vatican Council, Lumen Gentium (1964); Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter XXV (1646).
Secondary: Avery Dulles, Models of the Church, expanded edition (Image, 2002); Henri de Lubac, Catholicism: Christ and the Common Destiny of Man (French original 1938; English, Ignatius Press, 1988).