Do you have to be a Christian to be saved? If we refer to the biblical texts, we think not. In other words, the teaching of Scripture on salvation makes faith in Jesus Christ a sufficient condition for salvation, but not a necessary one. What we are proposing here is a creative, perhaps unprecedented, conception that aims to do justice to Scripture and reason, and to articulate the question of gratuitous justification and human justice.

1. Christian salvation: deliverance from divine wrath

When we speak of “salvation” in a Christian context, we are referring to the deliverance that, according to the New Testament, man can obtain through faith in Jesus Christ, essentially deliverance from God’s judgement to come, and which proceeds from reconciliation with God. For example, in the Epistle to the Romans, Chapter 5, we read:

God proves his love for us in that, while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. How much more, then, now that we have been justified by his blood, we shall be saved from wrath through him. For if, when we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, being reconciled, will we be saved by his life.

Epistle to the Romans, Chapter 5, verses 8-10

This theme of God’s ‘wrath’, an anthropomorphism which denotes the antagonism of the divinity towards irreligious men, is well developed throughout the Bible and particularly in this epistle to the Romans. We will therefore continue to examine this text, which seems to us to provide the best elements on the complex question of Christian salvation.

1.1. The principle of Christian salvation by faith

The principle of the “Gospel” or “good news” is set out by the apostle Paul in Chapter 1:

I am not ashamed of the gospel; it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and then to the Greek, because in him is revealed the justice of God through faith and for faith, as it is written: The just shall live by faith.

Epistle to the Romans, Chapter 1, verses 16-17

Let’s make a few simple observations about this apostolic statement:

• The gospel is a power of God: there is therefore no definite article here, which would make its proclamation the only means or the necessary means of redemption for all men
• In the gospel, the “righteousness of God” is revealed; this righteousness is further explained in the rest of the text, and in particular in Chapter 3, verses 23 to 26, where the principle of free justification by faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe is set out
• This righteousness therefore concerns the justification of man, i.e. forgiveness, the remission of his sins, and it is obtained through faith, rather than by “works”, i.e. man’s efforts to appear righteous coram Deo (“before God”).

The epistle to the Romans therefore deals with the Gospel, and states the principle of faith in Jesus Christ as a sufficient condition for man’s salvation. We must examine the necessary character of this faith, and its object in view of obtaining salvation.

1.2. Universal “natural religion”

Now, in the same text we find statements which contradict the necessary nature of this condition, from the point of view of the subject classically called religio naturalis (natural religion). This question was known in the old Lutheran orthodoxy and was analysed and debated at length, until the Enlightenment, it seems, when certain deists took it up again; at least, this is what Wolfhart Pannenberg says in his Systematic Theology, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s theory of the ‘good savage’ echoes it.

The foundations of such a natural religion are to be found in Chapters 1 and 2 of the same epistle to the Romans. First of all, there is the principle of universal revelation (of an intuitive and non-verbal nature), which God addresses to all men, as we read in Chapter 1, for example:

The wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who unjustly hold the truth captive, for what can be known of God is manifest to them, God having made it known to them. For the invisible perfections of God, his eternal power and divinity, are seen as with the eye, from the creation of the world, when we consider them in his works […]

Epistle to the Romans, Chapter 1, verses 18-20

The text in fact introduces the subject in relation to a negative reaction to this revelation, where in verse 18 the apostle seems to consider that we can know its content (“the truth”) but repress or reject it unjustly (“hold it captive”), which would manifest itself in acts of impiety and injustice.

2. Principles of a natural religion

The same idea is taken up again in Chapter 2, when the apostle sets out the general principle of God’s judgement, reserving for some his antagonism (his “wrath”) and for others his favour:

But by your hardness and impenitent heart you are storing up for yourself a treasury of wrath for the day of wrath and of the manifestation of God’s righteous judgment, which will render to every man according to his works: reserving eternal life for those who, by perseverance in doing well, seek honour, glory and immortality; but irritation and wrath for those who, in the spirit of contention, rebel against the truth and obey unrighteousness.

Epistle to the Romans, Chapter 2, verses 5-8

Here, a principle other than that of the Gospel is stated: God will render to each one according to his works, which must not be confused with a false justification by works. In other words, the apostle claims that God’s (just!) judgement will be in accordance with the path that men have followed.

Now, only two possibilities are mentioned here: either hardening in the face of the knowledge of God’s nature and goodness, which is given universally by revelation, or perseverance in doing good, which manifests itself in the pursuit of “honour, glory and immortality”.

The principle of a “natural religion” is thus summed up and affirmed here, without any reference to faith in Jesus Christ, and therefore to the fact of “being Christian”: since the divinity is universally revealed to man’s conscience, he can either reject this revelation in order to pursue an unjust life, or pursue a good life, which implicitly denotes a reception of this revelation.

3. Justification and justice

3.1. Faith as a universal principle of justification

If we are to credit the apostle Paul with a search for coherence in the writing of this complex epistle, we must therefore consider that the development of the principles of the gospel which follow these general conceptions is not in contradiction with them. Now, the examples of the gospel principle of ‘justification by faith’ that are given are taken from the Old Testament – namely Abraham (Chapter 4, 1-5 and 9-10) and David (Chapter 4, 6-8) – with a key quotation from the book of Genesis (15:6) in Chapter 4, verse 3 (“For what does the Scripture say? Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him for righteousness”).

It is therefore clear that the “faith that saves” is not necessarily the Christian faith, since neither Abraham nor David were Christians. On the other hand, it seems to us that the principle which is universally valid is proposed in the same argument, still in Chapter 4:

Now to him that doeth a work, the wages are reckoned, not as grace, but as due; and to him that doeth no work, but believeth on him that justifieth the ungodly, his faith is reckoned unto him for righteousness.

Epistle to the Romans, Chapter 4, verses 4-5

So, according to the apostle Paul, the principle of justification by faith consists essentially in believing in God who “justifies the ungodly”, i.e. in implicitly recognising one’s own ungodliness and seeking in God himself the grace of redemption.

3.2 Bringing together the principles of natural religion and justification by faith

Thus, the example of Abraham – and that of David – shows that the content of the “faith that saves” depends on the revelation accessible to each man according to the circumstances of his existence, and Jesus Christ may or may not be known to him: faith in Jesus Christ does not therefore appear to be a necessity for man’s justification.

This brings us back to the question of natural religion: if all men have not come to know Jesus Christ through the proclamation of the apostolic gospel, no man is without the universal revelation addressed to all men. To take up Karl Barth’s conception in his Dogmatics, if faith is in a universal sense “receptivity” to the revelation that God gives of himself, then salvation by faith is accessible to all men, not necessarily Christians.

This could be seen as a contradiction with the principle of natural religion, which seems to take “obedience to justice” rather than “faith in him who justifies” as the criterion of divine favour. But in our opinion, the contradiction is only apparent, if the apostle meant, as we think he does, that these two aspects of man’s path are only two aspects of the same reality, two sides of the same coin.

Conclusion

It seems to us that, in the light of an analysis of the doctrine found in the epistle to the Romans, the “evangelical” or orthodox Calvinist slogan, which would have us believe that “only Christians are saved”, must dissolve into a more nuanced understanding:

• The principle of salvation is reduced to an eschatological judgement, which gives way to a path of justice that every human being can choose in the face of a universal revelation that the divinity gives of itself
• There are only two alternatives, and the road to salvation is paradoxically also the one where man despairs of his own piety, in order to seek his justification in God alone through faith, which is precisely receptivity to this revelation
• The authentic ‘Christian’ is one who follows this path of righteousness, accepting in faith the ‘final’ revelation that is the gospel of Jesus Christ, and is therefore a special case of the righteous man described by the apostle Paul.