Faith In Many Routes To Salvation, Ctd

Polling shows that many believers reject the idea that only practitioners of their religion can be saved. Dreher contemplates this idea:

I believe Orthodox Christianity is the fullest expression of the true path to salvation, liberation or paradise. But I don’t agree that only Orthodox Christians will find their way to salvation. My view is that God may save anyone, but that if anyone is saved, it is through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and through the mercy of God the Father, who, in his infinite wisdom and compassion, may choose to extend it to those who confessed Christ imperfectly, or who didn’t confess him at all. That, by the way, is the official teaching of the Catholic Church. It’s not the same thing as universalism, which holds that everyone will be saved, no matter what.

I'm a little less orthodox than Rod here (surprise!) because I find the strict atonement doctrine too, well, un-Jesus like in its exclusivity (and then there's the problem of limbo). I share Rod's view that what we can glean of Jesus from Scripture and tradition endures as a world-historical revelation of God's love, and it was when that entered human consciousness that salvation became possible for everyone. And not just salvation after death, but salvation that has nothing whatsoever to do with the future. I think the Buddha reached the same conclusion centuries earlier, in a very different cultural and historical context, but Jesus' calm acceptance of an unjust and brutal fate and the widespread belief in his resurrection, gave his drama a force that spread it around the world with stunning speed.

Have other sons of God existed? Surely. Saints have always existed. We probably meet them now and again and have no idea. Is faith in Jesus essential to being saved now and for ever? Yes and no. Yes, because he exemplified the way and the truth and the life. No, because he wasn't the only human being to have done so. But can those who affirmatively reject Jesus' message be saved? I don't see how. But I don't know. I am not God. Nor should any of us pretend to be.