St Cyprian of Carthage notoriously remarked that ‘outside the Church there is no salvation’ (Ep. 72). This has often been misinterpreted to mean that only those who are visibly within the institutional Church are saved. But as St Augustine said of the Church of his day, ‘How many sheep there are without, how many wolves within!’ (Homilies on John 45.12).
It is not our visible membership of a human institution that determines our salvation, but the nature of our relationship with Jesus Christ. However, this does not mean (as some today suggest) that membership of a local Christian community is somehow irrelevant. The Greek theologian, Christos Yannaras, spells out why participation in the worshipping life of the Church is a vital part of the process of salvation:
The liturgy of the Church is not simply an expression of religious worship, but the core and sum of her life and truth, of her faith and ethics. The life and truth the Church, her faith and her ethos are a liturgy, an organic function of a unified body which receives man in order to save him, to make him whole and restore him to the fulness of his existential possibilities as a person: ‘What shall the receiving of them be, but life from the dead?’ (Rom. 11:15). (The Freedom of Morality, p. 85)
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