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On some levels I hate that I have to even write about salvation as the second entry in a guidebook to progressive church. Yet it needs to happen, so here we go.
I suspect the relaxed approach to salvation progressive churches take separates us almost more than anything else from larger western Christian movements. If you want to trigger conservative Christians one of the easiest methods is to raise the specter of universalism.
So I’ll go ahead and say it: I’m a universalist. I tend toward the belief that God is about the work of restoring/healing/making whole everything.
If forced to answer the question “will everyone be saved?” I’ll simply go with the affirmative: Yes.
I love what the contrarian Lutheran Søren Kierkegaard wrote in his journals: “I do not pretend to be better than others. Therefore what the old Bishop once said to me is not true–namely, that I spoke as if the others were going to hell. No, if I can be said to speak at all of going to hell then I am saying something like this: If the others are going to hell, then I am going along with them. But I do not believe that; on the contrary, I believe that we will all be saved, I, too, and this awakens my deepest wonder.” (Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers: Autobiographical, 1848-1855, p. 557)
I have a couple of concerns about traditional notions of salvation, and these necessitate a longer meditation. Good thing this is a post with the goal of about 2000 words. Hopefully you’ll get your money’s worth.
My first concern is with the basic presumption, made by many in religious community, that they can know for sure who is saved and who isn’t. There’s a basic confidence in many communities that if you “get saved”—which in this tradition is defined roughly as accepting Jesus as your personal Lord and Savior following some path of contrition and prayerful acceptance, followed by baptism by immersion—then you can be certain of your salvation. Concomitantly you can also be pretty confident that those who have not been saved like you have been saved are NOT going to be saved, unless they also pray the Jesus prayer and get baptized.
All the others, anyone who wasn’t saved like you are, are living under threat. Their eternal salvation is at stake. Believing this, communities become very concerned about getting out into the world to “save the lost,” by which they mean “getting people to believe the way they believe.” This is why so many of the largest churches are so focused on missions. A ginormous church here in our community has as their mission statement: “Reaching Northwest Arkansas, America, and the World for Jesus Christ.”
Those are some big pants.
There are many, many presumptions in such a mission statement, beginning with the notion that the unreached need to be reached, that the unreached are actually “unreached,” and that anyone should ever under any circumstances use the word “reaching” in the first place. The presumptions multiply: that the church reaching has something the unreached don’t, that no one else has already reached before they reached.
I could go on.
Implicit in this kind of mission is a basic paternalism. We have something others do not. Because they are our subordinates (they are not yet saved whereas we are saved) it is our responsibility, in their best interests, to reach them with this “gospel” we bring. We will introduce a wide set of restrictions on their current practices and beliefs because the message we are bringing to them is, even if they don’t know it yet, superior to theirs and in their own best interests. They don’t know they aren’t saved, but we can fix that. We must try to fix that.
My second concern is the presumption that we can actually know who is saved. I mean, you’d think there was sufficient evidence just in Scripture alone to disabuse all Christians of this notion. Scripture is full of texts illustrating how dangerous it is to assume you are saved while others aren’t. Just look at Matthew 25, Jesus’ parable of the sheep and the goats, where literally everyone is caught by surprise, both those who “inherit the kingdom” and those who don’t.
The greatest danger in Christianity as seen over and over in the history of God with God’s people and in the teachings of Jesus, is literally to hold the opinion that you can know that some are saved and others aren’t, and you are one of the chosen. the Bible is one giant warning against holding such opinions.
Instead, what we get in Scripture is (in spite of quite a bit of co-optation to the contrary) the story of God’s continuing relating to their people and all of creation with the ultimate promise that all of it will be, in the last day, gathered up into God.
This is why I’m always reluctant to spend a lot of time talking about universalism or salvation because I think it actually distracts us from the more nuanced and beautiful sense articulated in Scripture of divinization (theosis, deification). Here the Eastern Orthodox and some other Christian traditions (see Irenaeus and Origen and so on) get this much better than most of Western Christianity.
The classic text here is 1 Corinthians 15:28, that “God will be all in all,” or as the CEV translates it: “Then God will mean everything to everyone.”
The full sentence of 1 Corinthians 15:28 reads: “But when all things have been brought under his control, then the Son himself will also be under the control of the one who gave him control over everything so that God may be all in all.” So there is even in Paul’s articulation of God’s being “all in all” a kind of structure of “control” we’ll need to consider and circle back to. But I like David Bentley Hart on this point:
“But God is not a god, and his final victory, as described in scripture, will consist not merely in his assumption of perfect supremacy “over all,” but also in his ultimately being “all in all.”
This is closer to what I actually mean when I say I believe in universalism or that “all will be saved.” It is not, and this is crucial, that I believe everyone will end up saying the Jesus prayer and getting baptized even if they haven’t yet, or that somehow all peoples and all of creation will be saved in the way I personally envision salvation.
Rather, what I believe (perhaps I should say what I trust) is that God is the sort to make things right. I do not know precisely how—and I suspect the what of salvation to be far more integral and holistic than anything we can imagine—but I operate by and large with a considerable degree of trust in God to get it right, ultimately speaking.
Because I live with that basic level of trust, I simply don’t concern myself overly much with eternal salvation. I’m far more interested in, and believe Christian communities are invited to concern themselves with, the ways in which we can live now in greater or lesser resonance with God’s ultimately making whole all things.
It makes very little sense to me to preach a sermon that will convince anyone that if they just believe the right things they’ll be saved, if I haven’t spoken in a community in a way that inspires that community to meet the basic needs of their neighbors. You might say that neighbor-love in action is the sign of a community who lives in abiding trust of a God who has the whole “salvation” thing under control.
This brings me back around, in the end, to the issue of control. I’ve just used the word “control” in a way I feel comfortable with. To say God has salvation “under control” means, as we say colloquially, “they’ve got this.” It’s all good. Don’t worry, I ordered the cake for the birthday party. That kind of “it’s under control.”
However, the message of how Jesus has accomplished salvation is often utilized in communities of faith in a way that is attempting an altogether different kind of control. The concept, popular among many Christian communities, is that Jesus offered himself up as a substitution or sacrifice for us. We would have borne God’s wrath for our sins, but instead God inflicts all that wrath on his Son Jesus on the cross.
I believe this way of thinking about the cross is very popular in many Christian circles because it gives the leaders of those circles power and control. They can use the threat that somehow if you don’t get fully covered in the blood of Jesus you’ll be outside protection from the wrath of God as a way to keep people in community, and control them while they’re in it.
You see this all over whenever people are excluded from community once they step outside the strong social controls, if they come out as gay, or get divorced, or start espousing socialist political opinions. It’s not just that they are alienated from the community. They also come under threat of God’s wrath.
I actually believe Christ’s death on the cross signifies something quite different. I believe Christ’s death on the cross was, very simply, his solidarity with us. Christ was willing to bear the consequences of committing fully to love of neighbor, in particular the poor. All of us are familiar with how difficult it is to truly stand in the breach for the vulnerable. For example, it’s rather hard for the executive of a large poultry company to advocate for an actual living wage and protection for workers and a union because they are likely to lose their job.
Jesus was willing to live sacrificially and became a sacrifice, not in the sense of appeasing God’s wrath but as simply living authentically in solidarity with the world. And like anyone who does this, as we see time and again, from MLK Jr. to Archbishop Romero, this can result in death.
However, how this relates to eternal salvation has nothing to do with ‘satisfying’ God and everything to do with ‘solidifying’ God. I don’t know if I can use that term or if it’s even the right term. What I mean is that it shifted something in God in terms of God’s solidarity. God is now the God who is in Jesus, the Jesus who died on the cross, so whatever our relationship to death was God now also has that relationship with death, and whatever relationship God has with death in Jesus is now the relationship we have with death.
In Christ God overcame death. So the promise is we will also. How everything will look the other side of death, I leave that up to God. God’s got it under control. I have no interest in using the space created by God in God conquering death as a way to conquer others. Progressive Christianity does not grasp preaching about eternal salvation as an instrument of control. It instead trusts God and so invests in the freedom to love our neighbors, taking the model of Jesus as an icon of how much struggle that will be at times.
If we are going to talk about eternal salvation, that’s probably the main focus. We’ll need the kind of trust we can muster in a God who sees to such salvation to “see us through” what it will mean to live in this world in the way of Jesus’s cross.
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I frequently recommend, for those who would like a book-length meditation on how Scripture has been misinterpreted repeatedly on the topic of universal salvation, David Bentley Hart’s That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation. For example, he writes:
“For the earliest Christians, the story of salvation was entirely one of rescue, all the way through: the epic of God descending into the depths of human estrangement to release his creatures from bondage to death, penetrating even into the heart of hades to set the captives free and recall his prodigal children and restore a broken creation. The sacrifice of Christ was not a “ransom” paid to the Father, but rather the “manumission fee” (λύτρον, lytron) given to purchase the release of slaves held in bondage in death’s household.”
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Reflections from a progressive Lutheran pastor in the South.
God our Saviorwants all men to be saved and to come to the knowleedge of the truth. The Lord is not willing that any should perish but that all should come to repentence. When we die we are. Born again, As Jesus said I am the resurrection and the life he that believes in me though HE WERE DEAD yet shall he live. All creation mourns the pains of childbirth.
"Now what I think the Mystery of Christ really means is that when God becomes incarnate in Jesus, he isn't just doing a job on one person who happened to live in Palestine two thousand years ago. Rather, he's manifesting in Jesus – making sacramentally present in Jesus – what he's been doing all along in all persons and, for that matter, in all things. But it's also more than that. The Incarnation isn't just God coming into the world of time and place; it's also God taking all times and places into himself so that they'll all be present to him in his peacemaking, forgiving, reconciling power. Nobody is left out, you see."
(Capon from The Mystery of Christ… & Why We Don't Get It)
"For the incarnation of the Word of God - that is, of God himself in human flesh - is the root of the church's catholicity. And that incarnation is not simply the poking of the Second Person of the Holy and Undivided Trinity into a single human being named Jesus but that Person's abiding and irremovable prescience in all people, at all times, and in all places - whether they know it or not , believe it or not, or like it or not,"
Robert Capon - The Astonished Heart
"[…] we're saved because everybody has not only been given a free ticket by the presence of the Incarnate Word to everybody by the Mystery of Christ but has also, by that same Mystery, actually been put into the stadium and been given free beer, banners, and hot dogs."
(Capon, The Mystery of Christ… & Why We Don't Get It)