The Christian man, conformed to the likeness of that Son Who is the firstborn of many brothers, received "the first-fruits of the Spirit" (Rom. 8:23) by which he becomes capable of discharging the new law of love. Through this Spirit, who is "the pledge of our inheritance" (Eph. 1:14), the whole man is renewed from within, even to the achievement of "the redemption of the body" (Rom. 8:23): "If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the death dwells in you, then he who raised Jesus Christ from the dead will also bring to life your mortal bodies because of his Spirit who dwells in you" (Rom. 8:11). Pressing upon the Christian to be sure, are the need and the duty to battle against evil through manifold tribulations and even to suffer death. But, linked with the paschal mystery and patterned on the dying Christ, he will hasten forward to resurrection in the strength which comes from hope.Gaudum et spes then continues on to consider those outside the church:
All this holds true not only for Christians, but for all men of good will in whose hearts grace works in an unseen way. For, since Christ died for all men, and since the ultimate vocation of man is in fact one, and divine, we ought to believe that the Holy Spirit in a manner known only to God offers to every man the possibility of being associated with this paschal mystery.In short, Gaudum et spes holds out the possibility that the soteriological gifts enjoyed by Christians are available to "all men of good will in whose hearts grace works in an unseen way." God "offers every man the possibility of being associated with [the] paschal mystery." How this can be is a mystery that is "known only to God."
A passage from Vatican 2's Lumen gentium offers a similar vision:
God [is not] far distant from those who in shadows and images seek the unknown God, for it is He who gives to all men life and breath and all things, and as Saviour wills that all men be saved. Those also can attain to salvation who through no fault of their own do not know the Gospel of Christ or His Church, yet sincerely seek God and moved by grace strive by their deeds to do His will as it is known to them through the dictates of conscience. Nor does Divine Providence deny the helps necessary for salvation to those who, without blame on their part, have not yet arrived at an explicit knowledge of God and with His grace strive to live a good life.
Lumen gentium describes how non-Christians can "attain to salvation" if they "sincerely seek God" and are "moved by grace to do His will as it is know to them through the dictates of conscience." There are people who will be saved who "have not yet arrived at an explicit knowledge of God" but who, with God's grace, "strive to live a good life."
The Catholic theologian Karl Rahner had a name for this mystery as described by Gaudum et spes and Lumen gentium, how saving grace is at work in the lives of non-Christians in "an unseen way," "men of good will" who follow the "dictates of conscience" and who "strive to live a good life" though without "explicit knowledge of God." Rahner called these people "anonymous Christians." People who are Christians who don't know they are Christians.
How could this be? How can someone be an anonymous Christian?
I'm no Rahner scholar, but having read his Foundations of the Christian Faith let me try to offer a simple summary of anonymous Christians.
The central idea, as I see it, is that God wills to save everyone. Consequently, God creates human beings with a capacity to respond to grace. This capacity, given supernaturally by God, is primarily an inner experience of transcendent seeking, longing, and recognition, which may or may not become explicit confession or belief. In this experience of transcendence, universally present and available, every person encounters what Rahner calls God's "offer" of Himself. Some say "yes" to God's offer and begin to navigate their lives in light of this experience.
Rahner says that this experiential preparation must precede the gospel proclamation, otherwise the gospel would arrive stillborn, falling on indifferent or uncomprehending ears. Without a prior experience of God the gospel wouldn't resonate with lived human experience, and be perceived as either alien or inert. The gospel proclamation converts us because it provides an explanation for something we've already experienced and know to be true. As Rahner writes,
Christian teaching, which becomes conceptual in reflexive, human words in the church's profession of faith, does not simply inform man of the content of this profession from without and only in concepts. Rather it appeals to reality, which is not only said, but also given and really experienced in man's transcendental experience. Hence it expresses to man his own self-understanding, one which he already has, although unreflextively.
Notice the moves here. Christian teaching, the verbal and conceptual aspect of dogma and doctrine, the "human words" of the faith, do not impart content and information "from without." Rather, we already know the gospel, but this knowledge is experiential rather than verbal and propositional. Consequently, when I first encounter the gospel I hear a message that "appeals to reality," something I've already "really experienced" in my life. As Rahner says, "It is not the case that we have nothing to do with God until we make God conceptual and thematic to some extent. Rather, there is an original and unthematic experience of God, although it is nameless." The propositional knowledge of the gospel, putting everything into words, is simply a confirmation of something I've known to be true my entire life. When I hear about Jesus I recognize him as the one who has always been with me. As Rahner says, "the world is our mediation to God in his self-communication of grace, and in this sense there is for Christianity no separate and sacral realm where God is to be found." We encounter God everywhere in the world and in our experience.
Here's how Rahner describes this pre-propositional, pre-verbal, pre-dogma, pre-conceptual experience of God:
We can say without hesitation: a person who opens himself to his transcendental experience of the holy mystery at all has the experience that this mystery is not only an infinitely distant horizon, a remote judgment which judges from a distance his consciousness and his world of persons and things, it is not only something mysterious which frightens away and back into the narrow confines of his everyday world. He experiences rather that this holy mystery is also a hidden closeness, a forgiving intimacy, his real home, that it is a love which shares itself, something familiar which he can approach and turn to from the estrangement of his own perilous and empty life. It is the person who in the forlornness of his guilt still turns in trust to the mystery of his existence which is quietly present, and surrenders himself as one who even in his guilt no longer wants to understand himself in self-centered and self-sufficient way, it is this person who experiences himself as one who does not forgive himself, but who is forgiven, and he experiences this forgiveness which he receives as the hidden, forgiving and liberating love of God himself, who forgives in that he gives himself, because only in this way can there really be forgiveness once and for all.
Rahner goes on to say that this experience might be stronger or weaker for some individuals and vary over time. But most importantly for Rahner, this experience, either weak or strong, is the experience of every human person and exists prior to and independently of explicit religious knowledge, belief, and confession:
The experience which we are appealing to here is not primarily and ultimately the experience which a person has when he decides explicitly and in a deliberate and responsible way upon some religious activity, for example, prayer, a cultic act, or a reflexive and theoretical occupation with religious themes. It is rather the experience which is given to every person prior to such reflexive religious activity and decisions, and indeed perhaps in a form and in a conceptuality which seemingly are not religious at all. In God's self-communication is an ultimate and radicalizing modification of that very transcendentality of ours by which we are subjects, and if we are such subjects of unlimited transcendentality in the most ordinary affairs of our everyday existence, in our secular dealings with any and every individual reality, then this means in principle that the original experience of God even in his self-communication can be so universal, so unthematic, and so "unreligious" that it takes place, unnamed but really, wherever we are living out our existence.
Now, is this universalism? No. Again, the experience Rahner describes here comes in the mode of an "offer" made by God to every human person, an offer sensed deep within the soul. People can reject this offer. Others, though, accept the offer, and live in harmony and attunement with it. That said, not everyone brings their acceptance of the offer into full, explicit Christian confession and belief. Such persons are Christian in their yes to God's offer, but anonymously so. Should full confession come the person experiences the onset of conceptual understanding, the arrival of words, as giving name to a reality already experienced, and harmoniously so. The experience of an unknown God is given a name--Jesus Christ.
Having shared all this, let's return to the question raised by this series, the relationship between well-being and ontology. Recall the question we're asking: If our flourishing flows from our attunement with the Real, and Jesus Christ is the ontological ground of the Real, whence comes the flourishing of non-Christians? Karl Rahner's thoughts, I think, are helpful here. The notion of "anonymous Christians," along with the vision of Vatican 2, suggests that non-Christians can live in contact with our ontological ground. This vision supplements Maximus the Confessor's claim that all virtue, no matter where we find it, participates in God's own life. Goodness has no other source. Virtuous and flourishing non-Christians, therefore, pose no puzzle. God makes his offer to every person, universally. We can say yes or no to that offer. We live in attunement with our inner experience of God's self-communication to our souls, or we suppress that inner voice of longing and conscience. We also go on to experience the lived consequences of our choice. All of this precedes any explicit confession of faith or intellectualized belief, which might never happen in this life.
Still, contact with the Real is being made. An unseen grace is at work.
