Judgment begins in the house of the Lord (1 Peter 4:17), and many of the first shall be last, and the last first (Matt. 19:30). When one considers these and related passages, one sometimes gets the impression that the Bible balances Cyprian’s claim that there is no salvation outside the church (extra ecclesia nulla salus) with an at least equally emphatic insistence that the beginning of damnation, of deliberate opposition to God, is possible only within the church, within the people of God: Jesus pronounced his woes (and wept), it will be recalled, over the cities of Israel, not those of the Gentiles. On this view, there is no damnation–just as there is no salvation–outside the church. One must, in other words, learn the language of faith before one can know enough about its message knowingly to reject it and thus be lost.
— Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine, 45.
