Genesis, while not the most important book of the Bible, is the most fundamental. Likewise, Extra Ecclesiam Nulla Salus, though not the most important dogma of our Faith, is the most fundamental. Is it any wonder that both the sacred book of Genesis and the infallible Dogma of Salvation have been so vehemently attacked and so diabolically undermined in our day?
Drawing from the enlightened genius of St. Augustine and several other saints, this article will attempt to show that the Catholic Church being necessary for salvation does not just apply to those men who lived after Pentecost Sunday. It does not even just apply to men but rather to all intellectual creatures — men and angels.
The thesis here defended is twofold: (1) For as long as there have been creatures in whom grace has actualized their potential for knowing and loving their Creator, there has been the Church by which they have been incorporated into that Divinity by the grace mediated to them by the Sacred Humanity of Our Lord Jesus Christ; and (2) just as we can defend the literal meaning of Genesis from a multitude of sources — papal encyclicals, the writings of the Fathers and Doctors, the various sciences of geology, archaeology, and quantum physics — so, too, the necessity of the Catholic Church for salvation can be defended from a multitude of sources besides the three famous ex cathedra definitions: it can be defended, in fact, even from the very first chapter of Genesis.
Two Powerful Passages
Genesis 1:26: Let Us make man to Our own image and likeness. Many Fathers and Doctors have offered explanations of and insights on this verse; however, instead of limiting ourselves to a mere exposition of what they have said, let us examine this verse together in light of another profoundly mysterious passage of Sacred Scripture — Romans 8:29: For whom He foreknew, He also predestinated to be made conformable to the image of His Son; that He might be the firstborn amongst many brethren.
Much is implied by this fascinating statement of St. Paul’s. To unpack its richness, we need to ask a few questions. (1) Why does St. Paul say we are to be conformed to the image of God’s Son? (2) What does he mean by the image of His Son? (3) How is conformity to that image effected? (4) Who are those whom God has foreknown and predestined to this conformity? And (5) what does St. Paul mean by predestinated?
These five questions — and the answers to them — will comprise the road map for the theological inquiry we are now undertaking. They are like five facets of a crystal prism through which we will shine the light of Genesis 1:26, revealing a vision as breathtaking as any revealed by devout scriptural exegesis.
First Question: Why His Son?
Genesis says man was made to the image of God—why, then, does St. Paul say we are to be conformed to the image of His Son? St. Thomas in Question 93 of the Prima Pars, called, “On the End Term and Production of Man,” undertakes to show what it means for us to have been created in the Imago Dei, and he says it does not mean that we were created with the image of the Sacred Humanity of Jesus Christ as its prototype (cf. ST I, Q. 103, A. 5, rep. 4). This is interesting because there is a strong patristic tradition, especially in the East, that—we are. St. Athanasius (cf. SAI, 28 & 38) St. Peter Chrysologus (cf. DG, 228), and St. Irenaeus of Lyons all posit the Word Incarnate as the model God used in fashioning Adam—not to the exclusion of the image of the Trinity, but as a further concretization of it.
The answer to this first question, therefore, brings us face to face with the notion of the Absolute Primacy of Christ, which says, in essence, that the material universe exists for man, and man exists for Christ. The whole created world, the entirety of cosmos, material and immaterial, is ordered to Him, as St. Paul says in I Cor. 3:23: for all are yours; and you are Christ’s; and Christ is God’s. All created reality is ordered to Christ specifically because He is the Firstborn of all creation; in Him it has pleased God that all fullness should dwell; of His fullness we have all received; that in all things He may hold the primacy. The primacy that Christ holds in the mind of God is not a chronological primacy. It cannot be. God is outside of time. It is rather, an ontological primacy, a primacy of being. A simple way of putting this is that because Our Lord in His Sacred Humanity is the best beloved Son of the Eternal Father, He is therefore the most important aspect of all created reality, and all else that has been created has been created for Him.
It is with appreciation for the absolute primacy of Christ that St. Peter Chrysologus and Bl. Anne Catherine Emmerich and others held that Adam was made with a striking if not perfect physical resemblance to Jesus Christ, and even Eve with a physical resemblance to Our Lady. Does this not make sense? As creatures, we are predestined to be conformed to the image of Christ because Christ Himself in His Sacred Humanity, is the perfect creature. More than that, even: He is the Prototype, the Model of all creatures.
Why are we to be conformed to the image of God’s Son? Because the mode of being that God willed for man ab initio was an esse in Christo. Ours is a Christocentric cosmos. Period.
Second Question: What Does Image Mean?
Is this, though, how we are supposed to understand the notion of image used by St. Paul — a striking physical resemblance? No, of course not. But, if it does not mean that, then what exactly does it mean?
Image is quite a complex concept, owing to the fact that this word has both a concrete usage and an abstract one. Take Genesis 1:26 — Let us make man to Our own Image. It would seem a simple enough thing for someone to capitalize the i in image and conclude that, since Our Lord Jesus Christ is the Image of the invisible God (Col. 1:15), and since Moses says we are made to this same Image, then clearly we are made to be concrete reproductions of Christ. He is the Original, we are the copies. Nor would this be an original conclusion, given the saints mentioned above who so concluded. Used in this concrete sense, an image is a sign derived from, produced in imitation of, or analogously attributed to that which it signifies.
Let us examine this definition more closely. A sign, philosophically speaking, is that which conveys to a cognitive faculty knowledge of something other than itself. Images derived from that which they signify would include physical images like children — literally derived from the flesh and blood of their parents — as well as mental images like ideas, memories, and phantasms. Produced images would include statues, paintings, and even pieces of music inasmuch as they give knowledge about their composers. Think, too, of fake flowers, audio recordings, synthetic fur or leather, perfumes; even your sense of taste can be “fooled” by gustatory images like vegan hamburgers and margarine. Finally, some things are images by way of being analogously attributed to that which they signify: Hitler could well be called the historical image par excellence of an evil dictator, just as Ghandi has been made the ideological image of pacifism. Our Lord Himself claims such images as a Lamb to convey His meekness and a Lion to portray His strength.
But there is another usage besides the concrete: image may also be used abstractly. This latter sense can itself be broken down into the two broad categories of imago ex se and imago ex alio.
Ex se means “of” or “from” one’s self. Your image of yourself is your own aspect, your appearance, with its spiritual and material attributes, whether actual or potential, that conveys to an outside cognitive faculty knowledge of you. Thus, the imago ex se is that complex conglomeration of appearance and attributes that makes the thing itself intelligible.
The imago ex alio, then, is that complex conglomeration of appearance and attributes that makes something or someone else intelligible. In the language of scholastic philosophy, we might say that image ex se is logically prior to image ex alio: a thing must have its own form, its own appearance, before that form can be reproduced in another thing. Think of a statue of St. Peter. When St. Peter was alive on earth, he had an appearance that was properly his own. The statue of St. Peter, inasmuch as it has his appearance in it, is said to bear his likeness; it is a semblance of him. The whole purpose of that resemblance or likeness is to make St. Peter himself intelligible — not his statue. That is how an abstract imago ex alio works: to bear someone else’s image abstractly is to be that other person’s image concretely.
Now think of what this means for us. We are predestined to be made conformable to the image (abstract) of Jesus Christ — His appearance, aspect, form. But, if we are not talking about a physical, bodily conformity, again, what are we talking about?
Third Question: What Does Conformable Mean?
What does it mean that we are to be conformable to the image of Christ? The relationship between form and image is invaluable here. Image is the visibility of form; it is form considered as perceivable, intelligible.
What was the form that constituted the man Christ Jesus as totally unique among all other men? His Divinity. Remember Philippians 2:6: though He took the external form of a servant, He never ceased being in the form of God, thus, St. Paul says, He thought it not robbery to be equal with God. Fr. Ferdinand Pratt explains in his book on the theology of St. Paul: to be “in the form of God” and “to be God” are “necessarily equivalent expressions” (TSP, 314). Did this invisible divinity have a visible image? Yes. His name is Jesus. And for us to be “con-formed” — made one form with — the image of Christ means nothing other than for us to become by grace what Christ is by nature. Divine. Or, more specifically, divinized creatures. That is the whole purpose of sanctifying grace: to enable us to become sons of God by participation in the natural sonship of the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity.
Fourth Question: Who Are Those Predestined to Be Conformed to Christ’s Image?
But it is worth asking — who exactly are we speaking of? Who is it that God has foreknown and predestined to be united in form with the Godhead? When Bl. Dom Columba Marmion refers to Romans 8:29, as he does repeatedly in Christ the Life of the Soul, he rephrases the passage simply as, Praedestinavit nos Deos conformes fieri imagini Filii sui — He hath predestined us to be conformed to the image of His Son. Hence, this fourth question: Who is meant by the “us”? Just us men?
No. Angels, too.
That sounds odd, no doubt. Jesus Christ was the God-Man. How can an immaterial angel bear a likeness to the material manhood of the Word Incarnate? Well, he cannot. But nor does he need to. There are other genera in which angels and men meet on separate but equal footing.
The first of these is the genus of creaturehood. Christ, in His humanity, was the perfect Creature. But bugs and buffalo are also creatures, so that is only so helpful. The next genus is intellection. St. Thomas says, “The Image of God consists chiefly in the intellectual nature He possesses” (ST I, Q. 93, A. 3, resp.). Christ in His Sacred Humanity possessed a created intellect, as do angels and men. And while St. Thomas would argue that these powers comprise the essence of the Imago Dei, not the Imago Christi, the fact is that, since Christ was the first creature (ontologically) to possess a created intellect, I think it could be argued that these two spiritual faculties do render us in His image specifically.
The Genus of Grace
But there is still another genus in which angels and men together are properly classified, and that, according to Suarez and others, is the genus of grace. Sanctifying grace is the essential feature distinguishing angels and men as images of Christ specifically. Why? Because the Godhead as such apart from the Incarnation does not have grace. Grace is a creature con-created with intellectual persons, much in the same way that time and space were con-created with material objects. Now, St. Thomas roots the manner in which both angels and men are made in the image of God precisely in our being capax Dei (TIT, 4): capable of God because capable of grace. He says the actual possessing of grace belongs to a supernatural perfecting of that natural image (ST I, Q. 93, A. 4).
But it might easily be argued that St. Thomas does not go far enough. Consider the universally admitted truth that angels and men were created in grace. God did not create them in a purely natural state with an obediential potency to find Him and love Him. He could have. But He did not. This is critical. He created them so that along with their being brought into a natural existence came a virtually simultaneous act of elevation to the state of grace. The fact of this elevation — called original justice — would seem to prove that, while grace is not integral to our human natures, it is absolutely integral to our purpose.
It would be impossible to overestimate the import of this observation. For mankind to meet with angels in the genus of grace implies something far deeper than a mere capacity for God because we do not say that God is “capable” of knowing and loving Himself; God simply knows and loves Himself. And He does so without grace. That is how we can deduce that men and angels are both made to the image of Christ: because Christ, in His Sacred Humanity, possessed both the gratia unionis (the grace of union, that is, the Hypostatic Union) which is the Incarnation itself, and He possessed the superplenitude of sanctifying grace. He is the fountainhead of grace. Hence, along with but infinitely superior to our resembling Jesus by having an intellect and free will capable of God, we resemble Him by grace which makes us full of God. Plena Deo.
And, as we already saw when we considered the notion of conformity, the whole purpose of sanctifying grace is to make us sons of God. This is why Dom Marmion says that divine sonship is the primordial and preeminent way in which Christ is our pattern (cf. CLS, 49).
Now think what this meant for Adam. What God created in Eden was a divinized creature, otherwise known as a son, a carbon copy, if you will, of His only-begotten Son. He created an alter Christus, another Christ. Therefore, we can hardly help but conclude that Adam was a Christian. How could he not be? He had sanctifying grace, which meant that he was an adopted son of the Most High, something absolutely impossible except through the instrumentality of the Sacred Humanity of Jesus.
Dom Mary Eugene Boylan in This Tremendous Lover defines a Christian as a man composed of body and soul and the Holy Ghost. Adam had those. He also had Christian faith. St. Thomas says explicitly that Christ was revealed to Adam in the garden in order that his faith might be Christian faith (ST II-IIae, Q. 1, A. 7), and the Franciscan theologian Fr. Bonnefoy says that this faith flowered into Christian hope (cf. C&C, 320). And if Adam had faith and hope in Christ, can we imagine he not also possess Christian charity?
Now, St. Thomas in his explanation of the Creed says that these three supernatural Christian virtues are precisely what effect the unity of the Mystical Body (cf. BCQ, 134).
And so we are getting nearer to our goal of understanding the existence and role of the Church in the long ages preceding Pentecost. But we are not there yet. There is still one key concept in Romans 8:29 that we have to look at — predestination.
Fifth Question: What Does It Mean to Be Predestinated?
What does St. Paul mean that we are “predestinated” (or, “predestined” — these are the same thing) to be conformable to the image of Christ?
Broadly speaking, predestination can be understood in two senses: a general sense and a specific sense. The general sense is this: God chose to bring into existence, out of all the possible worlds He could just as easily have made with their infinitude of possible histories — this world. Predestination is God’s Plan for this world finished in eternity, just as Creation is that same Eternal Plan for this world initiated in time.
If we want to understand the transcendent nature of the Catholic Church, we have to try to grasp this general sense of Predestination. The Big Bang Theory comes in handy for this — the Catholic version, that is: “God said it and BANG, it happened.” The “it” here is not just the heavens and the earth and light as on the First Day of Creation. Rather, the “it” means the entirety of creation: the First Day through the Last Day with everything in between from Adam to Antichrist. Every bird, every battle, every thought, every flower, every atom bomb, every lost election, every triumphant expedition, every henpecked husband, every baby, every buffalo — everything. From God’s perspective, all of time, all of material reality, all at once, came into existence when God, Who is outside of time, uttered His eternal fiat.
Predestination is the hopelessly human word to describe the otherwise indescribable reality that, from God’s perspective, the whole project is finished. Creation was over the instant it began. Or, as St. Therese says in her sweet way, “God already sees us in glory and delights in our joy.” That is the general sense of Predestination: from God’s perspective, all is now, and the all that now is is exactly as He willed to permit it to be.
But what God sees in eternity, what He has decreed should be and, indeed, was from the instant He decreed it, still has to play out, as it were, in time. And so we have the specific sense of predestination, which is God’s Eternal Plan as applied to individuals. God freely chose from all eternity to bring into existence souls that He knew would use His gift of free will to cooperate with His gifts of grace and be saved. These we call the elect. God also chose to bring into existence souls that He knew would abuse their freedom, would reject His love, and so be damned. And these we call the reprobate.
This is how we may understand predestination in Romans 8:29: applied to men and angels in a general sense, God predestined us to be filial images of His Son; applied to us as individuals, God brought each of us into existence fully aware of whether or not we would achieve that sublime end.
The Catholic Church Ab Initio
Granting that these things are so, how does it follow that the Catholic Church not just is but always has been necessary for salvation — ab initio? To say Adam was a Christian is one thing. To draw that out and say that he was a member of the Catholic Church — as was Abel, and Abraham, and Isaac, and Judith, and Judas Macchabeus, and all the rest — may perhaps strike the reader as an exaggeration. We know that Our Lord founded the Catholic Church in time. How, then, could men who lived before the time of its founding be considered actual members of it? Actual members. Not potential members.
The answer to this lies in how we understand these two terms: Church and Mystical Body. They are two terms denoting one reality. How does that work?
It works in a manner analogous to how philosophy distinguishes between substance, essence, and nature. Those three are the same thing. Substance is the thing considered as it exists in itself. Essence is the thing considered as it is given to the mind to be comprehended; the thing as intelligible. Nature is the essence of the thing considered in terms of what it can do or what can be done to it.
If philosophia perennis can employ three terms denoting three aspects of one single reality, surely theology can employ two. For the sake of the argument, let us define “Catholic Church” as the Mystical Body of Christ considered in its concreteness in time, and let us say that the “Mystical Body” is the Church considered in its transcendence overarching and interpenetrating time. As we shall see when we consider such luminaries as St. Irenaeus, St. Augustine, and St. Robert Bellarmine, defining “Church” and “Mystical Body” in this manner, i.e., in relation to one another, clarifies quite a bit. The Mystical Body has always been understood to be the mystical extension of the physical Christ throughout time and space; but we also know that the Mystical Body is the Church, (a point contested by some theologians but settled once and for all by Pius XII’s Mystici Corporis). The difficulty arises when we must acknowledge just as firmly that Our Lord founded the Church in time. How better to reconcile this chronological-ontological conundrum than by saying that Our Lord founded in time an institution that transcends time?
Happily, I am not the first to say it. “The Mystical Body of Christ,” says Dom Mary Eugene Boylan in This Tremendous Lover,
is a four dimensional entity; it completely transcends space and time. The interaction of the Head and members is not limited by separation of space or time, and — what is important to realize as far as time as well as space is concerned — this mutual action can take place in either direction, into the past as well as into the future. For example, Christ…suffered for our sins before we committed them; Our Lady was redeemed before even the birth of the Redeemer, Whose death was the source of Her Redemption. For let it be remembered that the “soul” of this Mystical Body is the Holy Ghost, Who is outside all time; He is eternally. We exist in time — that is to say, we enjoy our life bit by bit in a long series of “nows;” an eternal being possesses his life “tota simul” — altogether and all at once — his existence is one eternal “now.” With such an eternal Being giving life to the Mystical Body, it is evident that the limitations of time and space cannot be applied to it in an ordinary way. (TTL, 44)
We must be clear on this point, however. It would be a patent absurdity to claim that, because God is outside of time, and because, from His perspective, He breathed a living soul into Adam in the same eternal instant that the Holy Ghost descended upon the Apostles at Pentecost, therefore Adam was somehow mystically subject to St. Peter, and that he somehow received a transcendent version of baptism.
That is not the argument being made here.
What is being argued is this: if we use the word “Church” to mean the Mystical Body considered in its concrete, temporally-bound external form — and by form we understand the philosophic concept of visible aspect or appearance; its imago ex se — if we accept that the word “Church” can really mean that, then it becomes an easy matter to suggest that the Church looked different in Adam’s day than it does in ours. The Church’s external form changed over time. That is all.
But what a change. Think of a caterpillar coming out of its chrysalis. Suddenly, the little worm that once crawled around consuming foliage has exquisitely beautiful wings and flies daintily through the air in search of flower nectar. What happened? Did the caterpillar change? Ostensibly, yes. But it is more accurate to say that the accidental form of caterpillar was discarded, and the butterfly’s true form was revealed. Now we can see the creature for what it is in its essence.
Is this not what happened to the Church at Pentecost? She existed ab initio, from the beginning. She existed in her current exquisitely beautiful form from Pentecost. And even after Pentecost, her external form is still developing, is it not? Only in Heaven will even the butterfly form of the Church be changed. She will be an eagle. She will be like to Him because She will see Him as He is.
The Church in the Old Testament Attested by Authority
Did the Church exist in the Old Testament? Indeed she did. In both St. Irenaeus’ Proof of the Apostolic Preaching and in his Against Heresies, we find ample references to the role of Christ qua Christ in the Old Testament and of the Christian identity of Our Lord’s pre-A.D. followers. This passage, for instance:
The prophets foretold the sufferings of the martyrs…and in their own persons they prefigured all these things for the love of God and for His Word. For, since they too were members of Christ, each of them in his capacity as member manifested Him whom, as prophet, he foretold. Together they are an image of the one Savior, and foretell the events of His life. For, just as by our members the operation of the entire body is made manifest, and as the figure of the whole man is shown not by one member but by all; so the prophets all prefigured the one Saviour, and each, in his capacity as member, foreshadowed some aspect of Christ.” (TWC, 233–234)
The existence of the Old Testament Church is likewise inescapable when one studies St. Augustine’s thoughts on what he calls the ecclesia ab Abel, the Church from the time of Abel, a theme he returns to again and again in different of his works (cf. EAA). The Doctor of Grace had no inhibitions about using the word “Church” in reference to the just of the Old Testament. Here is one example:
We are all members of Christ and one body together; not only those who are here in this place, but also throughout the whole earth; nor only those who are here at this time, but what shall I say? From just Abel until the end of the age, as long as men are born and give birth, whoever makes this passage through this life of the just…all this is one body of Christ…this Church, which is now a pilgrim, is joined to that heavenly Church, where we have angels as citizens… And it becomes one Church, the city of the great King. (EAA)
Rivaling St. Augustine in references to the presence of the Christian Church pre-Incarnation is St. Robert Bellarmine. He alludes to it repeatedly in De Ecclesia Militantis, even saying explicitly, “[A]lthough the Church of the Old Testament and the New are the same, nevertheless, the state of the New Testament Church is by far more excellent” (OCM, 3-4). In several places in the book, this idea of the ancient Church is so taken for granted that the Protestants were using it as justification for their teaching of an invisible Church; St. Robert would begin his rebuttals with words akin to, “Yes, the patriarchs were members of the Church, but —” and then proceed to explain why even then the Church was not an invisible reality. It was never an invisible reality. That is important.
These two points of (1) the Catholic Church being in a different state than that which She has had since the time of Our Lord but (2) still being visible as God’s True Church, are admirably connected by the Abbé Jean-Joseph Gaume, in his 1866 Catechism of Perseverance. There he asks the question: “Can it be said that the Church has always been one and the same?” and he answers: “Yes…. In order to protect religion, and to teach it to mankind, an exterior, visible, and perpetual society was necessary; this society is the Church. It, therefore, commenced with religion, and has always kept pace with it.” Next question: “How do we explain this truth?” Answer: “We find the Church existing at every period, from the beginning of the world. Under the Patriarchs it was restricted, like religion, to the family; under Moses, it expanded, like religion, into a national state; and finally, under the Gospel, it extended, like religion, to all people, of whom it has made but one family” (CP, 134-135).
“It extended to all people.” Think of St. John’s words in Chapter 11 of his Gospel, that Our Lord died to gather together in one the children of God that were dispersed. That there were “children of God” refers to the Mystical Body existing ab initio; that these children were “dispersed” refers to the state of the Church before Pentecost; in this state, according to St. Robert Bellarmine, the Synagogue was only one particular, sui juris church (cf. OCM, 143); by which he means that the Synagogue was representative of the larger body Mystical Body, much in the way that the “Ukranian church” or the “Melkite church” is spoken of as one particular church (lower case) but within and joined to the larger Catholic Church.
The Church in the Old Testament Attested by Theology
Besides the compelling testimony of these great saints, the notion of the Church existing in the Old Testament has been dealt with by various theologians. Yves Congar — ecumenist and neo-modernist though he was — is considered to have written the definitive work on the subject. And because he based himself on earlier, completely orthodox sources, especially St. Augustine, we have no cause to question his scholarship in this field. The same needs be said of Carlo Falconi and his Italian work, Humanity and the Christ: The Mystical Body in Adam and in Christ. The whole 430 pages of this book is dedicating to proving that Adam indeed was a member of the Mystical Body and showing the ramifications of that amazing reality. Again, while these authors are not necessarily reputable because of their modernist ideas on other subjects, the sources they cite and the authorities they lean on when addressing this particular question are themselves entirely trustworthy.
Beyond the theologians who defended it, however, the position we are considering is theologically sound of itself. What does theology teach us are the three requirements for being in the Church? Faith, the Sacraments, and authority. The just of the Old Testament had these.
Did Adam have faith? Yes. St. Augustine said, in fact, that “without faith in the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Christ…even the ancient righteous could not be cleansed from sins and justified by the grace of God” (EAA). Yes, Adam had faith.
Did he have the Sacraments? Yes. St. Robert Bellarmine makes this point when he argues for the visibility of the Church. He, too, quotes St. Augustine as saying: “In no name of religion, whether true or false, can men be gathered together except by some participation in signs or visible sacraments” (OCM, 112). The Old Testament just did not have the same Sacraments we do, nor did their Sacraments operate in the same way (St. Thomas talks about this in the Prima Secundae, Question 102), but there were Sacraments nonetheless, they were of God, and they distinguished then, even as they do now, those who were members of the True Church and those who were not.
Think about that. Think about Adam hundreds of years after the Fall, gathering his children together to offer sacrifice God, teaching his sons to gather their families together. Fast forward more hundresd of years, and we still see the “sons of God” named in Genesis gathering, even if it was just in the context of their immediate families, to offer sacrifice to the True God — absenting themselves from the idolatrous worship of the peoples around them. What else would that have been but a visible ecclesia — a people called out, set apart? Msgr. Joseph Pohle says that that dogma of monotheism was to the Old Testament just what the baptismal formula is to us (cf. GKEA, 213).
Did Adam have the same authority we do? Yes. Like us, Adam was answerable to the authority of God, and, as in our own times, that authority was manifested in two ways. First, through the natural law. Adam would have known the Ten Commandments, which are written on the heart of every man, even before God wrote them on the stone tablets. And, second, through the New Law, which, with grace, was also written on his heart. St. Thomas in Question 106 of the Prima Secundae says that those in the Old Testament who were in the state of grace operated under the New Law, the essence of which is the giving of the Holy Ghost. Since the Holy Ghost was most certainly given in the Old Testament, sanctifying grace, (which was most certainly operative!) worked in the just before Christ’s coming even as it works in us after His coming: uniting us to the Father by conforming us to the image of His Son.
That is why Saint Augustine concluded as he did that just of the Old Testament were Christians (cf. EAA). And we can add without fear of error that if they were Christians, then they were necessarily members of the True Church of Christ, the Catholic Church, which existed in the Old Testament in an external form different to but in an interior essence identical to the Church we have now. Though beyond the scope of this article, it would be a fascinating exercise to take the six points in De Ecclesia Militantis by which St. Robert Bellarmine enumerates in what the essential unity of the members of the Church consists, and consider how every one of them applies to the just of the Old Testament: they had, it would be seen, the same beginning, the same end, the same means of salvation, the same Spirit, the same Head, and even the same relation of members to each other (cf. OCM, 29). Given these points of similarity, it is hard indeed to escape the conclusion that we are talking about the same Church.
The Church’s Necessity for Salvation
Finally, we are moved to ask: Why did God arrange to have His Church exist from the beginning of time? Why did He not give one type of grace to the Old Testament just that made them holy and pleasing to Himself without actually making them His sons? Or perhaps a grace which would have made them His sons but not in, with, or through His only Son? Or maybe a grace which made them sons through His only Son as the Logos but not through the Sacred Humanity which the Logos would not assume until later in time. He could have. But what then would have become of Christ’s role as the One Mediator between God and men? There would be no need for it.
And that is how we know we are safely within the realm of Catholic orthodoxy: for an economy of grace that does not include the Christ as the Head of all creation is simply not the economy that God made when He created this world. Let us, rather, maintain with conviction that either no man comes to the Father but by Him holds for every man who has ever lived, or it does not hold.
In the end, we are left with one conclusion: The Church is necessary for salvation because Christ is necessary for salvation. What did St. Hilary of Poitiers say? — “The Church is Christ” (OB, 162). If we accept one, we accept the other. If we reject one, we reject the other.
To be saved means that during this trial period of our life we made correct use of our free will to accept the Truth when it was presented to us; we cooperated with God Who, in creating us, also pledged Himself to give us all the help we would need in order to fulfill our one, single, solitary mission on earth: to love His Son in such a way as to become that Son.
Nothing will be wanting on God’s part. He cannot be invincibly ignorant of any soul He has created; He cannot but love every soul and that beyond anything we can fathom, and He has already proven it by the Passion and Death of His Son. He cannot but want every soul to know Him and, being God, He is at no loss of expedients to make that happen. If God wants a soul to have the Truth in order that he might adhere to it, make public profession of it, receive those Sacraments which Truth Incarnate has stipulated ought to be received, submit to that authority which Love Incarnate established while on earth — nothing can stop God from achieving those ends. Nothing — except one thing.
If the soul herself does not want it.
God can conquer an ignorant mind. But He cannot — if we may use those words — He cannot conquer a proud one. Dom Boylan explains why:
God’s primary motive in all His works — in creation, in redemption, in every single act — must not be less than Himself. That is a law of His being; He cannot subordinate Himself, in His divine nature, to a creature, without self-contradiction…. Pride, which makes us appropriate the glory of all the good we have or do, is directly opposed to this law of God’s action, and therefore puts a limit to it. God cannot pour out His gifts on the proud without self-contradiction as long as they are obstinate in their attitude. As God Himself tells us by the pen of St. James: He resisteth the proud and giveth grace to the humble. (TTL, 77)
God resists the proud. He gives His grace only to the humble. It is thus that souls are lost. Many, many souls are lost because they cannot see or will not see how God could punish them forever when they are such good people. Our challenge as soldiers in the Church Militant is to be brave enough, charitable enough, and convinced enough of our own Faith to be able to ask such people in all gentleness — “Good by whose standards? Yours or God’s?”
There were lots of good people in Jerusalem for the feast of Pentecost in 33 AD: Parthians, and Medes, and Elamites, and inhabitants of Mesopotamia, and so on. They were all there to worship the True God in His temple as He had commanded. But when St. Peter scalded them in that first fiery sermon of his for their having killed the Author of Life, they did not say, “How dare you judge us? God sees our heart; He knows we were acting in accordance with our conscience, and if that is not good enough for Him then — .” No. Holy Scripture says they had compunction in their heart; they immediately asked, “What do we do? What does God want of us? He left you in charge, Peter. Speak. We are listening.” And what did St. Peter tell them? “Uh, just, yeah, be the best Jews you know how to be”? No. He said, “Repent and be baptized every one of you. Convert. Make public profession that you believe Jesus Christ to be the only Way, the only Truth, the only Life — the only Goodness that can properly be called good. Allow this Jesus to make you one with Him. If you are truly good Jews, then now it is time to become good Christians, that there may be one fold and one Shepherd.” Strong words. Indeed, strong enough that there were added to the Church that day about three thousand souls.
There Will Be One Christ
Is there any truth more consoling than this — that those who are truly naturally good, truly sincere, will infallibly be given by the all-provident, all-merciful God the opportunity to come to Christ. To come into Christ. To become supernaturally good. Good by God’s standards. And when that opportunity presents itself, they will, if they are humble, if they truly want to be saved, renounce whatever false beliefs they had previously held and follow the Lamb wheresoever He goeth.
They will change.
Because they will have seen, by God’s grace, that the Eternal Plan of their Creator ab initio predestined them to be made not just to the image of the Triune God, capable of knowing and loving Him by their amazing powers of intellect and will; but predestined them even to be conformable by grace to the image of His Son, actually knowing and loving their Creator. They will have seen that and this conformity can only be effected from within the Mystical Body of that Son which we call the Catholic Church — so that, in the end, when all is said and done, when the whole drama of creation has completely played out — what will there be?
As St. Augustine said: Erit unus Christus amans seipsum. There will be one Christ loving Himself.
That is the dazzling vision we encounter when we examine Genesis 1:26 through the prism of Romans 8:29. Is it not beautiful?
Thus we see the deep connection between Creation and the Church: the latter exists for the former. Br. André Marie, M.I.C.M., wrote an article in 2023 in which he made that point that, when one denies Creation, and he denies Biblical inerrancy, he denies the ordinary and universal magisterium, he denies the Church’s teachings on marriage; he compromises the God-given natures of things; he empowers the evil agenda of scientism; he dethrones theology as the queen of the sciences; and, finally, he robs the Church of her prerogatives as the Bride of Christ and the Ark of Salvation.
So, too, deny Extra Ecclesiam Nulla Salus, and who cares whether Creation as recounted in Genesis happened or not? What does anything matter anymore?
Sources
BCQ – The Book of Catholic Quotations (edited by John Chapin)
C&C – Christ and the Cosmos (Fr. Jean-François Bonnefoy, OFM)
CLS – Christ the Life of the Soul (Bl. Dom Columba Marmion, OSB)
DG – The Doctrines of Genesis 1–11: A Compendium of Traditional Catholic Theology on Origins (Rev. Vicotr P. Warkulwiz, M.S.S.)
EAA – “Ecclesia ab Abel: Thomistic Reflections on the Origin and Scope of the Church” (Fr. Francis J. Caponi, O.S.A.)
GKEA – God: His Knowability, Essence, and Attributes (Msgr. Joseph Pohle; edited and adapted by Arthur Preuss)
OB – The Only Begotten:A Research Project in Theology (Michael Malone)
OCM – On the Church Militant (St. Robert Bellarmine; translated by Ryan Grant)
SAI – St. Athanasius on the Incarnation: The Treatise De Incarnatione Verbi Dei (translated and edited by A Religious of C.S.M.V.)
TIT – The Image of the Trinity: A Study in the Development of Aquinas’ Teaching (Donald Juvenal Merriell)
TSP – The Theology of St. Paul (Fr. Fernand Prat, S.J.)
TTL – This Tremendous Lover (Dom Mary Eugene Boylan)
TWC – The Whole Christ: The Historical Development of the Doctrine of the Mystical Body in Scripture and Tradition (Fr. Emile Mersch, S.J.)
