Rival Miracles and Asymmetrical Inclusivity

The existence of extraordinary claims in rival traditions is a serious evidential problem only if one assumes that every genuine miracle automatically validates the entire surrounding religion. The Catholic tradition supplies reasons to reject that assumption.

Suppose a Hindu, Muslim, Mormon, Protestant, Orthodox Christian, and Catholic all report miraculous healings.

One cannot reason:

religious contexts differ → doctrines contradict → therefore all miracle evidence cancels out.

Why not?

Because the object of divine attestation has not yet been specified.

Imagine that all six people prayed, in varying degrees of conceptual adequacy:

“God, have mercy upon me.”

If God healed all six, there need be no contradiction whatsoever.

The event may vindicate:

God exists.

God is merciful.

Prayer can genuinely address God.

Human beings are objects of providential concern.

It need not vindicate six mutually incompatible ecclesiologies.

Indeed, Catholicism positively expects divine grace to operate beyond visible Catholic boundaries. So some non-Catholic miraculous claims, if genuine, could actually be more expected under Catholicism than under a strongly exclusivist theology in which God simply refuses extraordinary grace outside one institutional group.

That is a fascinating inversion of the usual objection.

This is a useful analytical name for the position reconstructed here.

Catholicism can say:

All genuine divine miracle is from the one God.

All truth vindicated by God is compatible with the fullness of truth in Christ.

Grace can operate outside visible Catholic communion.

Partial participation in Christian goods can be real outside full communion.

The existence of such goods does not erase differences in fullness.

No true divine sign can formally certify a contradiction of revelation.

This is not relativism because contradictions remain contradictions.

And it is not crude exclusivism because divine action is not restricted to the canonical boundary of Catholic membership.

Augustine's “something Catholic outside the Catholic Church” language in the Donatist context is remarkably close to this structure. Vatican II develops it ecclesiologically in saying that authentic goods outside visible Catholic boundaries come from Christ and lead toward Christ.

This is among the most important conclusions yielded by Lambertini’s text.

Lambertini reports with approval the proposition that God can employ pagans, heretics, and schismatics as instruments in genuine miraculous action so that some truth pertaining to faith or morals is approved. He immediately invokes the Gospel case of the man who was not following the disciples yet cast out demons in Christ's name.

He then draws the restriction:

they cannot be employed by God for the confirmation of error or sin. Aquinas's reason is quoted: visible miracles can confirm faith, and a sinner may sometimes be involved in a true miracle, but a person announcing false doctrine cannot work a true miracle confirming that false doctrine, because God would thereby become a witness to falsehood.

That is remarkably close to the comparative-religion architecture already suggested by Augustine and the wider Catholic tradition.

But Lambertini goes further.

While discussing purported pagan prodigies, he entertains the view that if some such events truly came from God, they need not have been performed “in attestation” of pagan superstition. They could instead testify to divine providence, God's concern for human actions, moral innocence, justice, or some genuine religious truth. The text explicitly distinguishes divine action through a context of false religion from divine attestation of that false religion.

This provides a remarkably strong historical foundation for what this study calls asymmetrical inclusivity.

A compact Lambertinian formulation would be:

God's operation can extend beyond Catholic subjects; God's testimony cannot extend to falsehood.

That distinction is not Vatican II retrojected into the eighteenth century. It is already here.

One can now formulate the comparative problem far more rigorously.

Suppose a Muslim, Hindu, Protestant, Orthodox Christian, and Catholic each reports an extraordinary healing.

Lambertini's framework does not license the immediate move:

five conflicting religions + five miracles = five mutually contradictory divine revelations.

Before doctrinal comparison even begins, we must ask five logically prior things:

Did the events happen? What caused them? Are they miracles in the relevant sense? What were they ordered toward? What propositions can reasonably be taken as their object of attestation?

Lambertini’s text explicitly allows the conceptual possibility:

non-Catholic human context + genuine divine miracle + limited true object of attestation.

It simultaneously denies:

genuine divine miracle + intended confirmation of falsehood.

And Lambertini's discussion of pagan phenomena makes the distinction almost startlingly concrete: a genuine divine prodigy among pagans could attest Providence, divinity, innocence, justice, or moral truth without attesting the surrounding superstition itself.

This coheres closely with the model developed from Augustine and Vatican II, while Lambertini gives it a specifically miraculous and forensic formulation.

The genuinely strong Catholic thesis is subtler.

Catholicism could claim that divine grace and extraordinary divine action are not sociologically imprisoned within Catholic membership, while simultaneously claiming that God's intentional self-attestation is internally coherent and culminates in the revelation entrusted to the Church.

The Catholic comparative claim would therefore have to be made through convergence and specificity, not mere quantity.

A thousand poorly specified anomalous recoveries in Catholic hospitals would not necessarily possess greater vindicatory force than one highly specified event antecedently and publicly tied to a determinate claim.

Lambertini himself shows how much attribution depends upon:

invocation, timing, context, causal independence, public intelligibility, permanence, moral end, and the particular object supposedly being certified.

His discussion of a purported celestial sign attached to Protestant reform is an excellent example. He reports the objection that there was no plausible relation connecting the star to the Reformation and, among other things, that its appearance came decades too late to function persuasively as a confirming or predictive sign.

So mere coexistence in time or culture is not enough to establish vindicatory reference.

Lambertini’s own synthesis is especially important: pagans may, in some cases, be employed by God instrumentally so that a truth pertaining to faith or morals is approved, while they cannot be employed by God for the confirmation of error or sin. This permits real divine action in an unexpected context without erasing doctrinal contradiction.

“Asymmetrical inclusivity” names this structure. The term is analytical, not magisterial. Catholicism can be inclusive about the range of divine providence and grace while remaining non-relativist about the content of divine testimony.

Asymmetrical inclusivity should therefore be read as a participatory and Christological thesis, not merely as a logical strategy for neutralizing rival evidence. Divine beneficence can be wider than visible Catholic membership because all creation stands under one providence, while the fullness and final intelligibility of saving truth remain centered in Christ and ordered toward communion in his Body.

Lambertini, De Servorum Dei IV.1, ch. III, esp. pp. 34–35; Vatican II, Unitatis Redintegratio §3; Nostra Aetate §2.