I would imagine that for most people being saved is paramount. That is assuming, of course, that they think they need to be saved, because they think they are sinners who are lost and unable to save themselves. If they don't see the need to be saved "from outside," then Christ the Savior is irrelevant, as is faith in him. They can do it without him. At most, Jesus Christ is just a good example. We earn our salvation through our good works.

So if I think that God is not involved in my salvation, that I do it myself by my good works, then I have really done away with the faith perspective. I may keep a deist God, perhaps, who may be needed to get the chain of being started, but he does not save me.

Continue »

Pope Benedict has re-stated what the Church has always taught: Jesus founded the Catholic Church, which has faithfully passed on Christ's message. So what else is new?

What did indeed seem new in 1964 was the Second Vatican Council's declaration (Decree on Ecumenism) that the "separated Churches and Communities" could be regarded as "instruments of salvation." But the sentence where those epoch-making words occur continues "whose value derives from that fullness of grace and of truth which has been entrusted to the Catholic Church."

Pope Benedict's most recent document re-states both aspects of this teaching from the Second Vatican Council. Benedict identifies the Catholic Church with the one Church founded by Christ, but the Pope also states that elements of truth and salvation are present outside the visible confines of the Catholic Church.

I do not believe that Benedict's effort to clearly explain Catholic doctrine will undermine ecumenical efforts. The search for Christian unity is not about glossing over doctrinal differences; it is about trying to clarify points of agreement and disagreement, and going deeper in our understanding of the truth about God.

Did Jesus literally rise from the dead? Twenty-five years after the event St. Paul gave this unambiguous answer: "If Christ has not risen, our preaching is in vain and so too is your faith" (I Cor.15,14).

The message of the first believers was not the Sermon on the Mount; it was Resurrection. "I recall to your minds the gospel I preached...what I also received...that Christ died for our sins, in accordance with the scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day." (I Cor.15,1-5). The risen Christ is not a reanimated corpse; "what is sown perishable, is raised imperishable" (I Cor.15,42); but raised he was. An un-risen Jesus is an un-divine Jesus, and instead of Christianity what we have is an ethical teaching shorn of the supernatural, a pallid deism, or what Flannery O'Connor famously called "the Church of Christ without Christ," "where the blind don't see and the lame don't walk and what's dead stays that way.