Salvation Is Not Just About Belief
This is worth getting right.
It is false teaching — certainly it is not Catholic teaching, nor the teaching of Scripture — that salvation is simply about belief.
Put simply, the human person goes to Hell (if they go to Hell) because they ultimately fail to will for integration around the true moral good; that is, they not only fail to will the true moral good, they fail to will to will it.1 This disposition leaves a person self-divided and alienated from him or herself, which in turn prevents closeness between persons, including union between them and God. This is why Hell is taught by the Catholic Church to be eternally self-willed separation from God. Hell is not where God sends us because we didn’t believe; Hell is where God allows us to go because of what we positively will.2
Thus, salvation has little to do with assenting to some collection of abstract propositions, of having a certain degree of confidence in them, or whatever. What God wants is our moral perfection, our character to be formed in such a way (through the twin process of justification and sanctification) that we can be freely, lovingly united to Him; that our internal fragmentation and alienation be healed, and mutual indwelling between persons – particularly between human person and God – made possible. This demands spiritual regeneration and re-integration of our psyche – a psyche wounded from original sin and a will that inclines toward power and perceived welfare interests over the true good. For these reasons God does not just care that we believe in Him; really, God cares that we believe in him but also why we believe in him. Once this is understood the problem of divine hiddenness is no longer so mysterious. For somebody may believe in God, or even just want to believe in God, for some completely wrong or useless reason or set of reasons, hence it would not be surprising if God allowed such a person to endure a spell of agnosticism or atheism, for the hope – perhaps the best or only hope – that such a person would re-form their belief in God under better circumstances, circumstances that were actually conducive to moral regeneration (receiving God’s grace) and seeking to be close to God, not just belief in God. This means that belief in God is a necessary but not sufficient component to a life of true faith, where faith is understood not just as propositional assent but a full-fledged disposition for one’s entire life, a life centered around Christ, willing what God wills and detesting sin.
The point, stated differently, is this. The common and obviously true claim that God wants people to believe in Him does not entail the further obviously false claim that God wants people to believe in Him and does not care the reason why. Thus, as Van Inwagen has pointed out, it becomes quite possible to say God could regard something like the following situations as ranked from best to worse concerning their value.3
1) Pat believes, because A, that God exists.
2) Pat believes that God does not exist.
3) Pat believes, because B, that God exists.
That is, “B” might be such a bad reason, for the purpose of justification (in the Christian, not epistemic, sense), that God might see 2) as being objectively far better than 3). Thus, God might allow 3) to drop belief in God, moving to 2) for hope of eventually attaining 1).
Finally, Scripture itself clearly teaches that belief is but one component of the much larger complex of the life of faith essential for salvation: “You believe in the one God—that is creditable enough, but the demons have the same belief, and they tremble with fear" (James 2:19).
For a detailed account, see Eleonore Stump’s Atonement, Chapter 7.
It is also reported in the Catholic Catechism (paragraph 1035) that the chief punishment of Hell is eternal separation from God — the loss of the beatific vision. Whether there are other punishments is, of course, a matter of ongoing theological debate.
Peter Van Inwagen, The Problem of Evil 145-146.