I begin with a gambit. I invite you to trust that in order for us to reflect together on the topic of good works as salvific, I need you to first read this long passage from Sallie McFague’s The Body of God. Here goes:
The Direction of Creation and the Place of Salvation
The immediate and concrete sense of the cosmic Christ - God with us in liberation and in defeat - is the first level of the scope or range of God's body. But there are two additional dimensions implied in the metaphor that need focused and detailed attention. One is the relationship between creation and salvation in which salvation is the direction of creation and creation is the place of salvation. The metaphor of the cosmic Christ suggests that the cosmos is moving toward salvation and that this salvation is taking place in creation. The other dimension is that God's presence in the form or shape of Jesus' paradigmatic ministry is available not just in the years 1-30 C.E. and not just in the church as his mystical body, but everywhere, in the cosmic body of the Christ. Both of these dimensions of the metaphor of the cosmic Christ are concerned with place and space, with where God's body is present in its Christic shape. Christian theology has not traditionally been concerned with or interested in spatial matters, as we have already noted, priding itself on being a historical religion, often deriding such traditions as Goddess, Native, and "primitive" for focusing on place, on sacred spaces, on the natural world. But it is precisely place and space, as the common creation story reminds us, that must now enter our consciousness. An ecological sensibility demands that we broaden the circle of salvation to include the natural world, and the practical issues that face us will, increasingly, be ones of space, not time.
On a finite, limited planet, arable land with water will become not only the symbol of privilege but, in-creasingly, the basis of survival. Geography, not history, is the ecological issue. Those in the Christian tradition who have become accustomed to thinking of reality in a temporal model - the beginning in creation; the middle in the incarnation, ministry, and death of Jesus Christ; and the end at the eschaton when God shall bring about the fulfillment of all things —need to modify their thinking in a spatial direction. We need to ask where is this salvation occurring here and now, and what is the scope of this salvation? In regard to the first dimension of the cosmic Christ, what does it mean to say that salvation is the direction of creation and creation is the place of salvation? To say that salvation is the direction of creation is a deceptively simple statement on a complex, weighty matter. It is a statement of faith in the face of massive evidence to the contrary, evidence that we have suggested when we spoke of the absurdity of such a claim in light of both conventional standards and natural selection. Some natural theologies, theologies that begin with creation, try to make the claim that evolutionary history contains a teleological direction, an optimistic arrow, but our claim is quite different. It is a retrospective, not a prospective claim; it begins with salvation, with experiences of liberation and healing that one wagers are from God, and reads back into creation the hope that the whole creation is included within the divine liberating, healing powers. It is a statement of faith, not of fact; it takes as its standpoint a concrete place where salvation has been experienced - in the case of Christians, the paradigmatic ministry of Jesus and similar ministries of his disciples in different, particular places —and projects the shape of these ministries onto the whole.
What is critical, then, in this point of view about the common creation story is not that this story tells us anything about God or salvation but, rather, that it gives us a new, contemporary picture with which to remythologize Christian faith. The entire fifteen-billion-year history of the universe and the billions of galaxies are, from a Christian perspective, from this concrete, partial, particular setting, seen to be the cosmic Christ, the body of God in the Christic paradigm. Thus, the direction or hope of creation, all of it, is nothing less than what I understand that paradigm to be for myself and for other human beings: the liberating, healing, inclusive love of God. To say that creation is the place of salvation puts the emphasis on the here-and-now aspect of spatiality. While the direction motif takes the long view, speaking of the difficult issue of an evolutionary history that appears to have no purpose, the place motif under-scores the concrete, nitty-gritty, daily, here-and-now aspect of salvation. In contrast to all theologies that claim or even imply that salvation is an otherworldly affair, the place motif insists that salvation occurs in creation, in the body of God. The cosmic Christ is the physical, available, and needy outcast in creation, in the space where we live, In Christian thought creation is often seen is merely the backdrop of salvation, of lesser importance than redemption, the latter being God’s main activity. We see this perspective in such comments as ‘creation is the prologue to history’ or ‘creation provides the background and setting for the vocation of God’s people,’ and in Calvin’s claim that nature is the stage for salvation history. In this way of viewing the relation between creation and redemption, creation plays no critical role: it is only the stage on which the action takes place, the background for the real action.
But in our model of the body of God as shaped by the Christic paradigm, creation is of central importance, for creation–meaning our everyday world of people and cities, farms and mountains, birds and oceans, sun and sky–is the place where it all happens and to whom it happens. Creation as the place of salvation means that the health and well-being of all creatures and parts of creation is what salvation is all about–it is God’s place and our place, the one and only place.
Having read that, you might read it again. It’s really good. Then, when you’re ready, continue on…
One of my all time favorite pieces of musical Americana is the song “I’ll Fly Away.” I’ve sung it with gusto for years, having first learned it while watching O Brother, Where Art Thou. It’s a perfect song, honestly, full of that energy and life that makes it tremendously malleable in a performer’s hands while simultaneously easy for the whole congregation to sing.
I have just one problem with the song, a single quibble. It paints a picture of salvation as escape, a sense of this life/this world as just a weary place to endure until a flight is booked to somewhere better.
I understand that many gospel songs, and the biblical imagery of “getting away,” emerges out of oppression. Who doesn’t want to get away from it all, and in particular who doesn’t hope for liberation from experiences of life in this creation that are bondage, decay, hardship?
However, if we take up McFague’s perspective, that creation is the place of salvation, we’d have to re-write the hymn.
Re-writing hymns is fraught. It would be hard to change the words of “I’ll Fly Away” without also wrecking the overall musicality. The music itself takes flight in a sense, and perhaps some gifted tune writer would need to discover the tune. But for a set of lyrics, we’d have to sing something like “I’ll fly on home Oh glory, I’ll fly on home/yes, I’ll try to make life on earth real fine/I’ll fly on home.”
I’m sure poets and song-writers can do better than that, but you catch my drift.
—
Christians have been debating since forever what place good works have in the economy of salvation. Paul wrote quite starkly in Romans 3:28: “For we hold that a person is justified by faith apart from works prescribed by the law.” So, works don’t save.
But then James responded: “What good is it, my siblings, if someone claims to have faith but does not have works? Surely that faith cannot save, can it?”
Internal to this debate (and to be clear, they both have a point, inasmuch as a reliance on works apart from God’s work is a flawed approach, but so is reliance on faith when you then sit around and do nothing) is a basic assumption: justification or salvation are for somewhere else (heaven) and take place sometime else (after death).
If we believe salvation only occurs after we die and takes us somewhere other-than-here, then of course we will write a lot of songs about this world not being our home, and talk a lot about how thankful we are that in spite of things being pretty bad here in this place, we have another place we’re going that will be better.
McFague writes, “Those in the Christian tradition who have become accustomed to thinking of reality in a temporal model - the beginning in creation; the middle in the incarnation, ministry, and death of Jesus Christ; and the end at the eschaton when God shall bring about the fulfillment of all things —need to modify their thinking in a spatial direction.” She’s inviting us to think of the gospel as related not to a narrative that has a beginning, middle, and end, but rather the gospel as moving in the direction of the healing of a place. As if the gospel doesn’t tell a linear narrative but instead rebuilds a neighborhood.
Circling back around to works and salvation, we are then invited to imagine that what we do here and now contributes in ways both large and small to the restoration of the very place that is the destination of salvation. It’s really an entirely different understand of the relationship between works and salvation. Works in this framework do not earn you favor with a God who grants you admission to a special realm, but rather works participate in the restoration of the very place this same God is restoring and saving.
“Salvation is the direction of creation and creation is the place of salvation,” as McFague writes.
I find this redirection of salvation incredibly compelling, but when I look at the historical liturgies of the Christian church, and much of the hymnody, I realize how scarce such imagery is in our general mythology. Thus, why McFague argues “it gives us a new, contemporary picture with which to remythologize Christian faith.”
I’d like to invite all those reading this post to travel with me on this point, and take it one step further. Traditionally, if a theologian were to assert that good works are salvific, many voices would chime in opposing the claim. One can find entire libraries full of books arguing the point of justification by faith, shelves full of works emphasizing that God alone saves, that our own good works cannot save us, that an understanding of works as salvific is works righteousness.
However, all of those concerns about works as not salvific are a part of a non-remythologized Christian faith which assumes salvation takes place later, and lands us some place else, rather than taking place now, landing us here.
If indeed salvation is now, in the present, centered in the paradigmatic ministry of Jesus Christ but not exclusive to him (or his time), and if salvation is here, in the creation we already share with God, then the debate about good works as salvific takes on an entire remythologized tenor. Good works in such a framework do not replace God’s works, do not usurb Christ’s unique work, but rather participate in the one work.
It is certainly the case that if, caught up as we may sometimes become, we become overly focused on performing good works in order to earn salvation, that might distract us and detract from the very works we wish to perform as good. But if rather such good works do not earn salvation but simply participate in it based on a paradigmatic model, that’s an entirely other way of thinking about good works and salvation.
I’ve spent a lot of years preaching and teaching the classic justification paradigm, that we cannot earn our salvation through our works but can rely on Christ’s faithfulness. McFague’s re-spatialization of salvation in creation has me thinking perhaps that I needn’t deny good works as salvation in order to rely on Christ’s faithfulness, but rather understand our good works as salvific as a faithful living out precisely of Christ’s faith as our faith.
It seems to me that this thinking boils down to being truly “present” in time/space, as aspired to/sought in meditative practices such as Buddhism, or becoming “awake” as in Gurdjieff/Ouspensky’s Fourth Way, or, indeed, becoming “aware” like Rumi, of God’s presence everywhere, including in every molecule/atom/etc. of our own bodies. Our works/actions and state of being are interdependent, not separate.
Clint, this is really helpful and a good reminder with our Mark 8 gospel text this week. How we live and what do does indeed matter as part of God's salvific work in creation and humanity. And how do we not get taken aside into other pursuits of our ego as Peter illustrates for us.