Matthew Mullins at Prosblogion, a blog given to questions and issues in the philosophy of religion, contemplates the necessary and sufficient conditions for being a Christian. He concludes that among the necessary conditions is this:
It shouldn't be the case that one have eternal salvation and not be a Christian.
To translate this from philosopherese into English what Mullins is saying is that only Christians have eternal life, but surely this is false.
Unless one is prepared to argue that infants and mentally retarded individuals do not have eternal life then there must be lots of people who have salvation who are not Christians (assuming that being a Christian requires a willful assent to Christ). Nor is it hard to imagine the universe of eternally saved individuals being expanded further to include people like the heroes of the Old Testament. If one is a theological inclusivist one might also expand the universe still further, as C.S. Lewis does in The Great Divorce, to include all whose hearts are open to God even if they've never heard of Christ or, for reasons psychological and/or sociological, have never made a commitment to Him.
At any rate, whether one's theology goes that far or not, it still seems highly unlikely that the proposition quoted above is true since it excludes innocents who die in infancy or who never possess the mental capacity to understand what being a Christian entails.
There are some who would argue that whoever is saved is ipso facto a Christian. Lewis, for example, talks about people who are "anonymous" Christians, but this seems to me to empty the concept of Christian of most of its unique content. Suppose, for the sake of discussion, that universalism were true - i.e. the view that everyone is ultimately saved is true. If that were the case then everyone would be a Christian, which seems, to me at least, exceedingly odd and would certainly seem odd to Muslims, Jews and atheists.
I think it makes more sense to simply think that eternal life might be available to others besides Christians.
RLC
