God has not abandoned the Jewish people, and Jesus Christ remains their Saviour: the Vatican’s new interfaith statement insists that Christians must hold both convictions together, however difficult the fit may seem. Published on 16 Sept 2026 with Pope Leo XIV’s approval, the A Journey of Hope rejects both a revoked Jewish covenant and separate Jewish and Christian roads to redemption.

That leaves a question with consequences far beyond interfaith conferences. Can Christ save someone who does not confess him? And if the answer is yes, what should Christians say to their Jewish neighbours?

For Anglicans, the argument will sound familiar. The difficulty is not finding Anglican voices that agree with Rome, but deciding which Anglican voices to hear. The new statement shares the historic Anglican confession of Christ’s unique saving work; its understanding of how that work reaches non-Christians is considerably more contentious.

A covenant that has not expired

Issued jointly by the Vatican departments responsible for doctrine, Christian unity and interreligious dialogue, A Journey of Hope reviews sixty years of Catholic engagement following Vatican II’s declaration Nostra Aetate. Its most arresting claim is not simply that Christians should respect Jews, but that contemporary Jewish religious life can enrich Christian faith because God continues to work among the people of the covenant.

The foundation is biblical rather than diplomatic: Paul’s account of Israel in Romans 9–11, God’s irrevocable gifts and calling, and the Jewish identity of Jesus himself. The note even recruits a Protestant witness, the Reformed theologian Karl Barth, citing his insistence that the Word became “Jewish flesh”. Jesus’ Jewishness is not a biographical detail Christianity can outgrow.

Yet the document refuses the apparently convenient solution of two independent covenants offering two independent routes to God: “Christ is the one and only Redeemer”. Its argument is not that Jews need no Savior. It is that God’s fidelity to Israel and Christ’s universal saving work cannot finally contradict one another.

From Florence to Vatican II

Set beside some earlier Catholic declarations, this language represents a striking change. In 1442, the Council of Florence’s Cantate Domino declared that those outside the Catholic Church, explicitly including Jews, could not attain eternal life unless joined to it before death. The distance between that warning and today’s invitation to learn from living Judaism is more than a change of manners.

But the story is not one of unbroken severity suddenly overturned in the 1960s. In 1863, Pope Pius IX maintained that there was no salvation outside the Church while acknowledging that people in “invincible ignorance” of Catholicism could attain eternal life through divine light and grace, if they followed the natural law and were ready to obey God (Quanto Conficiamur Moerore, §§7–8). Ignorance was not itself a saving virtue; the point was that ignorance for which a person was not responsible did not place that person beyond God’s mercy.

Vatican II made that distinction central to its account of non-Christians. Lumen Gentium, in 1964, taught that those who do not know the gospel through no fault of their own may attain salvation when, moved by grace, they seek God and follow his will as conscience discloses it. The Church remained necessary, but its visible membership was not a census of everyone grace could reach.

For relations with Jews, Nostra Aetate brought a more particular correction in 1965: Jews were not to be presented as rejected or accursed by God, collective blame for Christ’s death was repudiated, and antisemitism condemned. The same declaration affirmed what was true and holy in other religions while retaining the duty to proclaim Christ.

Post-conciliar teaching continued to defend both sides of that position. Dominus Iesus, issued in 2000, insisted that grace reaching non-Christians still comes through Christ and bears a mysterious relationship to the Church; other religions are not equivalent alternatives to Christian salvation. Rome had widened its account of grace’s reach, not abandoned its account of grace’s source.

The crucial Jewish application came in the Vatican commission’s 2015 reflection, The Gifts and the Calling of God Are Irrevocable: Jewish participation in salvation was affirmed, while its possibility without explicit confession of Christ remained “an unfathomable divine mystery”. That is not a guarantee of every Jewish individual’s salvation, nor a claim that Judaism supplies a redemption independent of Christ. The reflection also ruled out a specific institutional mission directed towards Jews, while calling Christians to bear witness to Christ humbly and sensitively.

That text expressly described itself as a reflection rather than a magisterial teaching document. A Journey of Hope cites it on Christ’s unique mediation, but does not announce the missionary policy anew. Its contribution is consolidation and practical application: stronger formation for dialogue, resistance to antisemitism and religious persecution, and perseverance despite the strains of Middle Eastern conflict. Compared with pre-conciliar teaching, the changed treatment of living Judaism is unmistakable; compared with recent Catholic statements, this is reinforcement, not revolution.

The disagreement within Anglicanism

Anglicanism’s Thirty-Nine Articles supply an obvious meeting point: Article VII locates salvation in Christ in both Testaments, while Article XVIII rejects the claim that diligent adherence to any “Law or Sect” is sufficient. The Vatican note does not contradict that central claim by offering a second Savior. The dispute begins when “Christ alone saves” becomes the further proposition “only those who consciously believe in Christ can be saved.”

The late Rev. Dr J. I. Packer, the Anglican theologian whose Knowing God introduced generations of readers to evangelical doctrine, gives the strongest resistance to separating those propositions. In endorsing Faith Comes by Hearing, a collection opposing “inclusivism”, he praised its “compelling case against Christian hypotheses of salvation for some apart from faith in Christ”.

Inclusivism is the disputed possibility that Christ saves people who do not explicitly know him. On Packer’s account, insisting that their salvation nevertheless comes through Christ does not settle the question: personal faith cannot simply disappear from the argument. His position therefore challenges the Catholic framework at precisely the point where it extends salvation beyond explicit Christian confession, not where it names Christ as the sole Redeemer.

His fellow evangelical, the late Rev. John Stott, approached the boundary with more hesitation. As rector of All Souls, Langham Place, and chief architect of the 1974 Lausanne Covenant, Stott helped shape the missionary convictions of evangelicals far beyond the Church of England. He was no advocate of interchangeable religions: the covenant rejected dialogue implying that Christ speaks equally through all religions and called for personal repentance and faith (§3).

Yet in Evangelical Essentials, Stott entertained the possibility that someone who had never heard of Jesus might cry to God for mercy and be saved through Christ’s atonement. “I believe the most Christian stance is to remain agnostic on this question,” he concluded. This was not agnosticism about Jesus, but restraint about drawing the boundaries of his mercy.

Here the Catholic position goes further. Stott leaves open whether the unevangelized are saved; the 2015 reflection affirms Jewish participation in salvation and leaves unexplained how. These are also different questions: the Jewish people are not simply another category of people who have never heard the gospel.

Stott’s practical conclusion was unequivocal: the obligation to evangelize “must include the Jews”, because the gospel is for Jew and Gentile alike. Catholic teaching still permits witness, so the contrast is not between speaking and silence. It concerns whether Israel’s covenantal standing warrants a distinct missionary policy.

Confidence without a verdict

The former Archbishop of Canterbury, the Rt. Rev. and Rt. Hon. Rowan Williams, offers a closer parallel to Rome’s willingness to hold Christian conviction alongside uncertainty about another person’s salvation. In his 2010 lecture The Finality of Christ in a Pluralist World, he defended Christ’s uniqueness while warning Christians against assuming responsibility for God’s judgments.

“We have often a vague feeling that God hasn’t read the proper books,” Williams observed, before saying he was content to let God judge how those outside the visible Christian family were related to Jesus. His humor served a serious point: confidence in Christ need not entail confidence that Christians can identify every place where Christ is at work.

Williams argued that Christians could recognize Christlike qualities in a Muslim or an agnostic, and learn from another faith without surrendering their own. That closely resembles the new note’s treatment of dialogue as a consequence of Christian faith, rather than an escape from it. It does not establish his agreement with every Catholic conclusion about Jews or institutional mission.

There is institutional Anglican support for this broader possibility. Sharing the Gospel of Salvation, a 2010 report commended by Williams and the then Archbishop of York, John Sentamu, affirmed the desire to bring others to explicit faith without claiming God was unable to save them otherwise. A commissioned report is not an Anglican creed, but it prevents Packer’s position from being mistaken for the only Anglican answer.

The verdict, then, is neither that Rome has abandoned Christ nor that Anglicans must now agree with Rome. A Journey of Hope stands on common ground when it insists on one Savior. Its Catholic framework conflicts with Packer’s resistance to inclusivism, goes beyond Stott’s reserve, and finds its closest Anglican counterpart in Williams’s confidence that grace may outrun our ability to recognize it.

The question is what follows when Christians meet their Jewish neighbors. Can the Church affirm Israel’s enduring covenant without weakening its invitation to faith in Jesus? The new statement does not make Christ optional. It challenges Christians to distinguish the necessity of the Savior from their certainty about whom he saves.