Salvation Lies Outside the Church

Back in the third century AD, Cipriano said that «Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus». For the ones who have forgotten their Latin classes, this phrase reminds us that there is no salvation outside the church. However, I note that many people find salvation every day outside their churches and discover that this is not the domain of any particular religious faith, not even of religion itself. What’s more, some people are forced to go outside their religious atmosphere to avoid being humiliated and subjected, or simply to live fully the message of the gospel.

To clarify what I mean when I use this term, I will draw on a magnificent definition by Jon Sobrino: «Salvation is life (overcoming the basic needs), against poverty, disease, death; it is dignity (respect for people and their rights) against non-recognition and contempt; it is freedom, against oppression; Salvation is brotherhood and sisterhood among human beings, configured as a family, which opposes Darwinism, or considering ourselves mere species; salvation is the pure air your spirit can breathe to move towards what humanizes (honesty, compassion, solidarity, openness to some form of transcendence), contrary to what dehumanizes (selfishness, cruelty, individualism, arrogance, blunt positivism)».

 
I know many Christian communities promote salvation every day, and lots of people live and share their faith in a lively and committed way. I firmly believe that God brings salvation within the churches, and that there are circumstances in which they are the bearers of salvation to people living in abject inhumanity. And it’s not just that I believe it–I have witnessed it. Communities, with their strengths and weaknesses, have committed themselves to their neighbors, promoting the salvation that they themselves received freely from God through other human beings. Churches that do not differentiate between the included and the excluded, but which have longed to be, along with others, the salt of the earth. Communities that have understood that it is a mistake to rush to consider themselves capable of separating the wheat from the chaff.

But on the other hand, I often see a particular structure and understanding of the churches presented as the correct way for the churches to be. If you add to this that other views are not welcomed, we will perfectly understand why there is a growing number of people who are either marginalized within their communities, or directly sacrificed for the sake of Christianity. Those who have been driven to the margins of the churches are striving to make another world and another church possible. But for many others, for those who have put a part of their life in their communities, now there is no choice but to get away from those communities in the quest for salvation.

And their communities, sometimes infantilized and alienated, only offer a dualistic way of understanding the world: the saved (those who accept a particular way of understanding morality, the world and God) and the lost (those who do to not submit to this narrow understanding of Christianity). The latter feel thwarted in their desire to move forward and fully develop as human beings; condemned in their pursuit of happiness and joy of life; limited when asking or answering real questions for being humans.

It is true that this is a painful situation for many people to live through. Some people, even after having left their communities many years ago, and knowing they did it in search of a true salvation, remember the past years and the people they have left behind with nostalgia. They even wonder what might have happened if their churches had been different.

But others in exile from religion recognize that getting away was the best thing that could have happened to them. Departing meant new horizons to them, a better understanding of the world in which they live, meeting with other marginalized people, whether religious or not, which enriches them. They have even discovered the experience that it is possible to be evangelized by the world. Many of them have felt the salvation of God given to them in the company of those who do not believe in any God. They have discovered that seeking and promoting the salvation of human beings has nothing to do with religion, but with men and women who are involved in achieving a fairer world: the Kingdom of God.

They do not reject their Christian roots, but they are absolutely convinced that the message of Jesus and the intransigence and sectarianism of their churches forced them to abandon those churches. I really believe that not only is there salvation outside the churches, but also that sometimes it is through the people who are sacrificed by them that God brings salvation to the real world. They are other disciples sent by Jesus who are not defended or supported by any church, who are not accredited by any religious authority, but by their actions, their commitment and their faith in the world that lies beyond the church.

Carlos Osma

From the book "Only a Faggot Jesus Can Save Us"

Available at Amazon