In 1995 the Doctrine Commission report The Mystery of Salvation12 looked at some of the issues involved here. It suggested that:

“…there is a plurality of ways by which people are being made whole in the here and now; these are ways the Spirit of God is working. And there is an expectation in the future, that, while people may have the freedom to reject the salvation that is available to all, through God as Trinity, God will save ultimately those who are willing to be saved, by their penitence and acceptance of the love which stretches out to them, in the way that it meets them in their lives and within their traditions.

There is only one way, but that way is one that is without barbed wire or boundary fences, so that all may join this way. If we think of salvation in the broadest as encompassing all that heals and enhances human life, then clearly aspects of salvation are available in many ways, not only explicitly through Jesus Christ.

In the ultimate sense, salvation is defined by having Jesus Christ as its source and goal. To use the terms we deliberately put aside earlier, this pluralism and this exclusivism are reconciled, not in some form of exclusivism (in the usual sense) but eschatologically, in the final purposes of God.

To recognise the life, death and resurrection of Jesus as ‘constitutive’ of salvation as well as revelatory, as Christians do, is to anticipate that he will prove to be the definitive focus of salvation in its fully comprehensive form. It may be, too, that our understanding of Christ will itself be enhanced when people of other faiths are gathered in.”13 86. The report further declares that although we restrict the fullness of God’s love if we deny: “…the truth and goodness which Christ as Logos, and God by the Spirit, can also inspire in those of other faiths and of none”, nevertheless Christians believe: that God has chosen to provide the fullest revelation of his love for all humanity in the cross and resurrection.

Hence we naturally pray that God will bring all people, including those of other faiths, to explicit faith in Christ and membership of his Church. This is not because we believe that the God revealed in Christ is unable to save them without this, but because Christ is the truest and fullest expression of his love, and we long for them to share it. In the Lord’s words in St John’s Gospel, ‘I came that they might have life, and have it abundantly.”