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non-Christian countries are abandoning the preaching of the gospel in favor of addressing issues
of peace and social justice.
3) The problem of incipient faith: From the perspective of these recent documents, the person
who comes to know the truth of the gospel is not the one who hears and understands it only, but
the one who recognizes it to be true. Only this person is required to embrace the gospel for
salvation. His faith is then explicit. But for the one who hears the gospel, all the while choosing
to reject it and believe the message of another religion, his faith is not false, but simply implicit
faith in Christ. It is faith without true understanding, but it is authentic faith nevertheless.
Taking this idea of implicit faith to its logical extreme, Karl Rahner, undoubtedly the most
influential figure on this issue both at Vatican II and in recent Catholic theology, contends that,
by it, even atheists can be saved. He writes, "The person who accepts a moral demand from his
conscience as absolutely valid for him and embraces it as such in a free act of affirmation--no
matter how unreflected--asserts the absolute being of God, whether he knows or conceptualizes
it or not, as the very reason why there can be such a thing as an absolute moral demand at all."
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The point is that an atheists free decision to accept a moral demand of conscience as binding is
an act of implicit faith in God.
The problems with this approach are obvious. One is that it is an essentially untestable
hypothesis in real life. How can one find any objective evidence of actual faith in God in one
whose fundamental presupposition is that there is no God? Moreover, the whole idea of implicit
faith and Rahners "anonymous Christian" is profoundly condescending to the dignity of the
human person. It essentially tells the believing adherent of another religion that no matter how
much he thinks he rejects Gods self-revelation in Christ as false, down deep he actually believes
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Rahner, Karl. Theological Investigations, 17 vols "Atheism and Implicit Christianity." (Baltimore: Helicon,
1961) 9: 153.