I think that many Christians would want to affirm the following:
1. Slavation comes through Christ alone.
2. Members of non-Christian religions (or people who adhere to no relgion at all) can be saved (and at least some will be).
The motives driving our affirmation of these two statements are, I think, a desire to affirm the traditional beliefs about the salvific uniqueness of Jesus Christ and a sense that it would be grossly unjust for people who, through no fault of their own, fail to come to explicit faith in Jesus to be denied any chance at salvation (either because they haven’t been exposed to the gospel message, or have been exposed to a distorted version of it, for instance).
Of course, it’s possible to simply deny one of the two statements. We could take the strong pluralist view that there are many paths to salvation, all more or less equal. Or we could take the strong exclusivist view that only those who explicitly confess faith in Christ in this life can be saved. The first view entails surrendering the heart of what Christianity has traditionally affirmed, so I’m inclined to take that off the table. And I suspect few of my readers are tempted by the second option, so I won’t address that directly in this post.
How we attempt to reconcile these statements, though, depends on how we answer a host of questions. Questions like “What does salvation consist in?” and “How does Christ save people?” If we say, for instance, that salvation consists simply in God forgiving us by fiat without requiring any response on our part, we could simply say that in virtue of Christ’s work on the cross all people have had their sins forgiven and are therefore saved, whether they know it or not (or, alternatively, that some specific set of people have had their sins forgiven, but not others, and this is entirely a matter of God’s will).
On the other hand, if we say that salvation does require some kind of response on our part, such as turning toward God, repenting of our sins, trying to live a life in accordance with God’s will, etc. (even if we are aided in all this by God’s grace), then we will want to see how someone can do those things without explicit knowledge and/or acceptance of the Christian revelation. One popular move is to see other relgions as vehicles for this kind of journey – the progress that people make along other spiritual paths is “credited” to them as service to God, even if their understanding of the truth (from a Christian perspective) is deficient. They have responded to God, even though their grasp of the god to whom they responded is inadequate. This view is depicted in C.S. Lewis’ The Last Battle when the virtuous Calormene warrior Emeth discovers to his surprise that his misguided service to the false god Tash was counted to him as service to Aslan.
One problem with this view is that it runs the risk of simply saying that all “people of good will” or “all basically decent people” will be saved. For one, how good does one have to be to be saved, and doesn’t this run the risk of turning into a doctrine of works-righteousness? And secondly, if anyone who is “basically good” can be saved, why the need for the Incarnation in the first place?
The problem may be that in trying to figure out how people can be saved without explicit faith in Christ, we’re setting things up in such a way as to make the Incarnation superfluous from the get-go. What’s needed, it seems to me, is a way of thinking abou this that preserves the importance of the Incarnation as a unique act of God for the redemption of humankind but also allows that those without explicitly Christian faith can be saved. We also need to consider how we consider salvation to be “transmitted” – i.e. what kind of connection does someone need to have to the salvific events in order to benefit from them?
A Thinking Reed 
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