How Is Man Saved?

Recently an evangelical enquirer, a member of the Episcopal Church/Anglican Communion Network, informed me that Holy Baptism is unnecessary to salvation and that all that is necessary for salvation is decisionism, 'trust and believe in the Lord as your Saviour and that is all that is needed.' The solafidanist comment was unsurprising, considering its origin, but flatly contradicts Anglicanism: the Book of Common Prayer Catechism, the Prayer Book Baptismal Office and the Anglican Tradition as a whole. So how is man saved, or more properly said, how are the Person and Work of Jesus Christ and the Life of the Holy Ghost appropriated to the Christian?

The consensus fidelium of the Catholic Church, the unanimous consent of the Fathers, is the doctrinal standard for Anglican, and therefore Catholic, belief and practice. Where the Apostolic Churches of East and West historically agree, there the deposit of Faith is found and the matter is settled dogmatically and practically: otherwise a profession of belief in the indefectibility of the ancient Undivided Church means virtually nothing. To go a step further, I sumbit that where traditional Western Catholics (Old Catholic and Anglican) and Eastern Orthodox agree, there we have the mind and teaching tradition, the consensus ecclesiae, of the First Millennium Church. To contravene that is to reject the authoritative teaching of the Body of Christ.

With that axiom working in the background, I present the Joint Orthodox-Old Catholic Theological Commission Statement entitled 'The Work of the Holy Spirit in the Church and the Appropriation of Salvation' 7 October 1983. This is an excellent and concise explanation of how man is saved...

Out of love for sinful man (Saint John 3.16), God our Lord sent his Son into the world, who reconciled all things in heaven and on earth (Colossians 1.20) and renewed creation by his resurrection (2 Corinthians 5. 15-18). Jesus Christ commanded his disciples to proclaim the Gospel to all nations (Saint Matthew 28.19f) so that his salvation may give light to all who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death (Saint Luke 1.79). The appropriation of salvation by individual human beings takes place in the Church through the work of the Holy Spirit who grants his grace. The Holy Spirit, who proceeds from the Father and rests in the Son and is given and has appeared through the Son to the faithful (Saint John of Damascus, Orthodox Faith 8), always remains in the Church, fills it and builds it up, renews and sanctfies it and makes it into an 'ark of salvation' for the whole world. He is the Paraclete who is sent by the Lord to lead the Church into all truth (Saint John 16. 13). All that the Saviour brings about in the Church for the well-being of men is, according to the holy Fathers, 'fulfilled by the grace of the Spirit' (Saint Basil the Great, On the Holy Spirit 16/39). The Holy Spirit is as it were the soul of the Church, the life-giving, sanctifying and unify­ing power of its body. The Holy Spirit and the Church are insepar­able: 'for where the Church is, there the Spirit of God is also, and where the Spirit of God is, there the Church is and all grace' (Saint Irenaeus of Lyons, Against Heresies 3.24.1). The Holy Spirit is fundamen­tal for the new existence of man in the Church whose rebirth occurs by water and the Spirit (Saint John 3.5). We humans receive the gift of the Holy Spirit in the Church through Christ, and thus become children of God and fellow heirs with Christ (Romans 8.15-17); we are brought back into communion with God, for which he has created us. The spirit of sonship lives in our hearts and cries: 'Abba, Father' (Romans 8.15; Galatians 4.6). He 'helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words' (Romans 8.26). The Spirit lives in the body of the faithful as in a temple (1 Corinthians 6.19). He unites them in the celebration of Holy Eucharist to the one body in the fellowship of the Church. He allows Christians to take part in his holiness; they become 'partakers of the divine nature' (2 Peter 1.4), i.e. 'deified through the partaking of the divine shining of the light and not changed into the divine being' (Saint John of Damascus, Orthodox Faith 26). He imparts to each individual his gift of grace for the building up of the Body of Christ: the gift of speaking wisdom, the gift of speaking knowledge, the gift of healing, the gift of discerning spirits, and especially the gift of ordained ministry as an organ for building up this Body (1 Corinthians 12:4-11).

God saves man without violating his free will. 'He wants all to be saved but he forces nobody. God is willing ... to save man not against his will and determination, but with his will and freely-made decision' (Saint John Chrysostom, Homily 3.6). The appropria­tion of salvation in Christ by man occurs by the cooperation of the Holy Spirit and man. The Holy Spirit effects the vocation, the illumi­nation, the conversion, the justification, the rebirth in Baptism and the sanctification in the Church; man, for his part, accepts the grace of­fered and participates freely by faith and his good works, in other words, by 'faith working through love' (Galatians 5.6). This cooperation is not to be understood as if God alone achieves one part of the work and man alone another; rather all things are achieved by God, without whose help man can do nothing for his salvation. But man also parti­cipates in all things, he is moved to act himself and not to remain inac­tive (Saint Augustine, corrept. 2/4: aguntur ut agant, non ut ipsi nihil agant). 'From the God of the universe, who works all in all, we must believe that he does it in the manner that he awakens, pro­tects and strengthens the free will which he himself once granted and not in such a way that he nullifies it' (Saint John Cassian, coll. 13.18; Saint Augustine, Spir. et litt 34/60). This cooperation of God and man embraces the entire new life in Christ. One cannot say that man behaves passively in any act of faith - and were it even the first one - and that God alone works in him. Correspondingly, the Church rejects any teaching according to which God alone grants his saving grace to some but not to others, thus by his decree predestinating some to salvation, others to damna­tion. God is not the originator of evil but the source of life and salva­tion. That is why he desires 'all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth' (1 Timothy 2.4). The rebirth and sanctification of men is the special work of the Holy Spirit. The outpouring of the Holy Spirit expected at the end of time has already occurred in the Church since the day of Pentecost (Acts 2.16-18). The glory of the end time is no longer merely a hope but already a present reality. The presence of the Holy Spirit in the Church offers certain guarantee for this. If we have in our hearts the part, which is the pledge of the Spirit, we will not doubt the whole, which is the perfection of the gift in the blessedness of eternal life (Romans 8.23; 2 Corinthians 1:22f; 5:5; Ephesians 1:13f; 4:30; Titus 3:6f; Saint John Chrysostom, res. mort. 8).