Questions Regarding Salvation
What follows is a chapter in a brief book I am writing concerning salvation. I invite you to engage with it and offer your responses.
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"Now is the acceptable time; see, now is the Day of Salvation!" (2 Cor. 6:2). Paul made that declaration near the conclusion of his discussion of God’s act of reconciliation in and through the mediation of Jesus Christ. We have already touched on some of the issues and concerns connected to conversations about salvation. My assumption is that salvation involves more than simply finding a path to heaven (though not excluding that concern). That being said, where should the conversation begin. Typically, we begin with the Pauline declaration that no human is righteous, all have sinned and fallen short of God’s glory (Rom. 3:23). That revelation is accompanied by the promise that in Christ we can be redeemed (saved) by God’s grace. In other words, God takes the first step to restore the broken relationship that is rooted in human sin.
The revelation that all have sinned and that in Christ God
redeems us as an act of grace, received through faith, is traditionally founded
on reference to the atonement. However, that reliance has proven problematic.
There are a variety of atonement theories, the most prevalent in Protestant
circles has been penal substitution, which presumes that God has judged us
worthy of death and that Jesus died on a cross as a sacrificial victim to
satisfy God's need satisfaction. Jesus paid
the debt we owed and could not pay. That traditional understanding has been
into question because it seems to run counter to the confession that God is
love. How can a God who is love require the death of one’s child to satisfy the
need for blood? This is a question that cannot be resolved in this forum, but
it requires our attention.
One concern that troubles many Mainline Protestants (my
community) concerns the overly individualistic nature of our discussions of
salvation. These conversations tend to center on what happens to us after we
die. If getting to heaven is our focus, then the primary purpose of the church
becomes getting the members across the line. In other words, the church becomes
nothing more than a lifeboat that is designed to rescue the perishing from the
grip of hell so they can be transferred to a heavenly pathway. Such a sense of
purpose can lead churches to engage in hard-sell evangelism. That in turn tends
to make many in the church shy away from sharing the importance of their faith
to life. But is that the biblical vision of salvation?
First of all, we need to raise the question of what our
ultimate destination is. Most of us have some vision of what the afterlife
looks like. For many, it involves a reunion with family and friends. Biblical
scholar N.T. Wright notes that when we look to the New Testament what we find is
a vision of salvation that is spoken of “in terms of God's promised new heavens
and new earth and of our promised resurrection to share in that new and
gloriously embodied reality—what I have called life after life after death—then
the main work of the church here and now demands to be rethought in
consequence.”[1] But,
whether we envision a more embodied presence on the new earth or union with
God, the question is, how does our doctrine of salvation impact the way we live
life before death? In other words, if we’ve fulfilled the requirements
to gain entrance to heaven, is that all there is to what it means to be saved? Wright
notes that the New Testament understanding of salvation starts with life here
and now. We enjoy it partially, but it is there for us to experience now,
in this life. Consider this word from Ernst Käsemann concerning faith and
salvation. He notes that when we hear the message in John from Jesus that “I am
the truth,” this “faith is not tied to a doctrinal system but to a person.”
Furthermore, he writes, that “salvation does not consist in on’s believing
something but in having a Lord whom one follows, from and toward whom one
lives. Salvation does not even consist in believing something correctly and
proclaiming it as salutary. It was always the greatest peril of the Christian
churches and devout communities that they abstract ted the truth entrusted to
them from the person of Jesus Christ and made it a religious doctrine.”[2] If we follow Käsemann,
salvation involves discipleship, of committing oneself to Christ as Lord. Thus,
the future is already present among us as we live in Christ (we will talk more
about putting on Christ in a later chapter).
If salvation leads to discipleship, then what we do and
say as persons who have tasted God’s saving grace and embraced it in Christ are
enabled to participate in God’s work through the Spirit in bringing wholeness/healing/salvation
to a world that is broken and fragmented. We cannot do this by ourselves,
under our own power, but through the Spirit, we can move toward what will occur
only fully when the new creation comes in its fullness. Thus, as N.T. Wright
offers: “For the first Christians, the ultimate salvation was all about God's
new world, and the point of what Jesus and the apostles were doing when they
were healing people or being rescued from shipwreck or whatever was that
this was a proper anticipation of that ultimate salvation, that healing
transformation of space, time, and matter. The future rescue that God had
planned and promised was starting to come true in the present. We are
saved not as souls but as wholes.”[3]
As we move through the following chapters we will be wrestling
with the question of salvation as more than saving souls so they can go to
heaven. This really isn’t a biblical vision, so we need to let that go. So,
what is salvation? How is God at work saving creation, which includes us? Could
it be that we struggle with anxiety over our fate and fear of death? Is it
anxiety over being enslaved and needing to be liberated? Or is it anxiety over
a sense of meaninglessness and despair? That is, as middle-class suburban
Americans where do our anxieties lie? From what must we be saved?
[1] N. T. Wright, Surprised
by Hope: Rethinking Haven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church,
(San Francisco, CA: HarperOne, 2008), p. 197.
[2] Ernst Käsemann, On
Being a Disciple of the Crucified Nazarene. Roy Harrisville, trans., (Grand
Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2010), p. 35.
[3] Wright, Surprised by
Hope, pp. 198-199.
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