How wide is God’s mercy? The Holy Spirit in other religions

Year after year, as students of mine worked their way through the Divine Comedy, they found it strange—magnificently strange at times, at times disturbingly so. One feature of Dante’s poem that usually met with resistance is the exclusiveness of paradise. Apart from the Old Testament worthies, it is peopled with Christians only. Hell too has plenty of Christians, of course, but in their case beatitude was once a possibility, now sadly forfeited. Not so the rest of the damned. They never had even a chance. Blameless non-Christians like Virgil, Dante’s guide, may be assigned to one of the less hellish circles, but they are nonetheless shut out of heaven forever.

What is wrong with this picture? As one young woman put it, “That’s just not the sort of thing God would do.”

Hers is an understandable reaction, which would probably be shared by many thoughtful Christian people. Somehow, they feel sure, commitment to Christianity does not commit them to believing that in the judgment of the God they worship every other tradition of religious belief and practice is worthless. Somehow, heaven cannot be a gated enclave to which only Christians are ever given a key. Somehow, “there’s a wideness in God’s mercy” that reaches beyond the borders of Christendom.

1. God aids men and women, individually and immedi­ately, changing the direction and goal of their whole existence, irrespective of desert or achievement on their part.
2. The transformation so initiated is analogous to interpersonal human love, but without any prior conditions or subsequent restrictions, so that it may be identified with the love of God given by God the Spirit.
3. This divine indwelling, since it is neither dependent on nor restricted by expressions of meaning, can and does occur in persons who have not met with the meaning of God incarnate that constitutes Christian religion.