ARE NON-CHRISTIANS SAVED?

My Dear Friends,

I often have people ask if non-Christian people can receive salvation and I suppose my answer is really “That is up to God”. It is not right for anyone to try to assume what God will do to each person and my hope would be that ALL COULD BE SAVED for perfect LOVE would not wish there to even be anything close to eternal damnation or hell.

I am not into “religion” per se’ yet I found the following sermon from Joseph Ratzinger (now the Pope) to offer a rather interesting view for a man who is supposed to promote a specific belief as The ONLY way.

There are areas in this that we differ and I often will post items of a controversial nature to see what my readers think (I suppose I must be more careful as something I posted this morning may have contained an attitude or information that some may have thought I agreed with in full and did not.

I indeed love ALL people and when I speak against something I am not doing so to be racist or hateful.. I find Hate Speech to be repugnant and I apologize if the Post I allowed to be there offended anyone… It was not intended to do so but I can understand the objection and I will attempt to be more cautious to at least post a more clear disclaimer when it might offend.

The whole ordeal with another site I am dealing with caused me to rush the post without a disclaimer and thus some indeed took it wrongly so I have eliminated that post… I will try to be more cautious hereon in but I wish to warn my readers that I am a FREE SPEECH advocate and therefore I often might post things so that both sides of an idea or issue might be available so I am true to my belief to “Learn all that is learnable and know all that is knowable and weigh and measure what is truth with LOVE”

Here is Ratzingers sermon from 1964

Are Non-Christians Saved?
In a 1964 sermon, the Catholic priest who later became pope discussed whether there is salvation outside the Church.
By Joseph Ratzinger


...Everything we believe about God, and everything we know about man, prevents us from accepting that beyond the limits of the Church there is no more salvation, that up to the time of Christ all men were subject to the fate of eternal damnation. We are no longer ready and able to think that our neighbor, who is a decent and respectable man and in many ways better than we are, should be eternally damned simply because he is not a Catholic. We are no longer ready, no longer willing, to think that eternal corruption should be inflicted on people in Asia, in Africa, or wherever it may be, merely on account of their not having "Catholic" marked in their passport.

Actually, a great deal of thought had been devoted in theology, both before and after Ignatius, to the question of how people, without even knowing it, in some way belonged to the Church and to Christ and could thus be saved nevertheless. And still today, a great deal of perspicacity is used in such reflections.

Yet if we are honest, we will have to admit that this is not our problem at all. The question we have to face is not that of whether other people can be saved and how. We are convinced that God is able to do this with or without our theories, with or without our perspicacity, and that we do not need to help him do it with our cogitations. The question that really troubles us is not in the least concerned with whether and how God manages to save others.

The question that torments us is, much rather, that of why it is still actually necessary for us to carry out the whole ministry of the Christian faith—why, if there are so many other ways to heaven and to salvation, should it still be demanded of us that we bear, day by day, the whole burden of ecclesiastical dogma and ecclesiastical ethics? And with that, we are once more confronted, though from a different approach, with the same question we raised yesterday in conversation with God and with which we parted: What actually is the Christian reality, the real substance of Christianity that goes beyond mere moralism? What is that special thing in Christianity that not only justifies but compels us to be and live as Christians?

It became clear enough to us, yesterday, that there is no answer to this that will resolve every contradiction into incontrovertible, unambivalent truth with scientific clarity. Assent to the hiddenness of God is an essential part of the movement of the spirit that we call "faith." And one more preliminary consideration is requisite. If we are raising the question of the basis and meaning of our life as Christians, as it emerged for us just now, then this can easily conceal a sidelong glance at what we suppose to be the easier and more comfortable life of other people, who will "also" get to heaven. We are too much like the workers taken on in the first hour whom the Lord talks about in his parable of the workers in the vineyard (Mt 20:1-6). When they realized that the day's wage of one denarius could be much more easily earned, they could no longer see why they had sweated all day. Yet how could they really have been certain that it was so much more comfortable to be out of work than to work? And why was it that they were happy with their wages only on the condition that other people were worse off than they were? But the parable is not there on account of those workers at that time; it is there for our sake. For in our raising questions about the "why" of Christianity, we are doing just what those workers did. We are assuming that spiritual "unemployment"—a life without faith or prayer—is more pleasant than spiritual service. Yet how do we know that?

We are staring at the trials of everyday Christianity and forgetting on that account that faith is not just a burden that weighs us down; it is at the same time a light that brings us counsel, gives us a path to follow, and gives us meaning. We are seeing in the Church only the exterior order that limits our freedom and thereby overlooking the fact that she is our spiritual home, which shields us, keeps us safe in life and in death. We are seeing only our own burden and forgetting that other people also have burdens, even if we know nothing of them. And above all, what a strange attitude that actually is, when we no longer find Christian service worthwhile if the denarius of salvation may be obtained even without it! It seems as if we want to be rewarded, not just with our own salvation, but most especially with other people's damnation—just like the workers hired in the first hour. That is very human, but the Lord's parable is particularly meant to make us quite aware of how profoundly un-Christian it is at the same time. Anyone who looks on the loss of salvation for others as the condition, as it were, on which he serves Christ will in the end only be able to turn away grumbling, because that kind of reward is contrary to the loving-kindness of God.

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BE LOVE & BE LOVED!