On
the Control of Salvation
A
Meditation Against the Power of the Church
I just read Acts
2:37-47. That reading includes Peter saying to people seeking salvation that
the thing they must do in order to be saved is repent and be baptized. I had to
ask: How did baptism get to be such a big deal in Christianity? After all,
Jesus never baptized anyone. In the Gospel of John he doesn’t get baptized
himself either.[1]
I’ve long wondered how a human ritual performed by a mere human being can be
necessary for anyone’s salvation. I’ve baptized people, both children and
adults, but I’ve never thought I ever saved anyone. I’m quite sure that I
haven’t. I don’t mean that the people I’ve baptized aren’t saved. I mean that
nothing I did was necessary for their salvation. Good Lord! I don’t want that
kind of responsibility. I’m not God. No human being is God. Jesus was both
human and divine, but the rest of us are just human beings. Surely no one’s
salvation depends on anything any of us does or can do. It can’t depend on
anything a church does either, for churches are human institutions and are as
fallible as we individual humans are. So I simply don’t believe that anyone has
to be baptized in order to be saved. Baptism is a human ritual. It simply
cannot be necessary for salvation.
Yet the notion
that baptism is necessary for salvation has a history nearly as long as the
history of Christianity itself. We see it in that reading from Acts that I just
mentioned. The scene is the first Christian Pentecost after the tongues as of
flame have settled on each of the disciples and they have begun to speak in
foreign languages they had not previously known. Peter has been preaching to
the crowd. Some people ask him and the other apostles what they should do.
Peter replies, “Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus
Christ so that your sins may be forgiven.” Acts 2:38 NRSV. It is actually strange
for Peter to tell people they had to be baptized in order to have their sins
forgiven, for as far as we know Peter was never baptized himself. Jesus called
him, but Jesus didn’t baptize him. Nonetheless, the Christian church from the
time when Acts was written around the end of the first century CE until the
present day many Christian churches have insisted and do insist that baptism is
necessary for sins to be forgiven, that is, for salvation. Why? Why does most
of the Christian church insist that only the baptized are saved? That is after
all another way of saying you have to be baptized before God will forgive your
sins. I cannot accept that the church says it just because the church believes
it is true, although I do not deny of course that a great many Christians do
think that it is true. So why does the church, most of it anyway, insist that
salvation requires baptism?
I can think of
only one reason—control. The church tells people they must be baptized. Then it
controls baptism. It turns baptism into something the church either will do for
a person, be that person a child or an adult, or that it won’t do for a person.
The church says baptism is our sacrament. You need it, and we can give it to
you or your children or not. Do you see the kind of control over people that
way of using baptism gives the church? Do what we say, the church says, or
we’ll withhold the thing that you need in order to be saved. That way of using
the sacrament of baptism puts people in fear for their immortal souls, then
gives them the only means of calming that fear, a means that the church
controls. The church uses baptism, or more accurately the threat of withholding
baptism, as a weapon pointed at a helpless person. The church uses baptism and
the threat of withholding baptism as a means of compelling people to do what
the church tells them to do and believe what the church tells them to believe.
Do what we say and believe what we tell you to believe, or we’ll make sure you
spend eternity in the torment of hell. Pretty nifty, and utterly appalling.
The church does
the same thing with the holy sacrament of the Eucharist. The church has taught
for centuries at least that attendance at mass and participation in the
Eucharist are essential to salvation. It has made people think that their
immortal souls are doomed if they are denied the Eucharist. That’s why the
threat of excommunication was and is so powerful. The church said, and huge
parts of it still say, do what we tell you to do, don’t do what we tell you not
to do, believe what we tell you to believe, and don’t believe what we tell you
not to believe or we’ll excommunicate you. That means we will deny you the
right to participate in Communion, that is, in the sacrament of the Eucharist,
that you need for your eternal salvation.
I had a personal
experience several years ago of the potential the church has for power and control through its control
of the Eucharist. Early in my ministry I was participating in an Easter vigil
service with three other Protestant clergypersons, one Episcopalian, one
Lutheran, and one Methodist. I was and am ordained in the United Church of
Christ. We held that service at the local Episcopal church. The Episcopal
Church is much more highly liturgical than is my United Church of Christ. We
celebrated the Eucharist in that service, and we did it the Episcopalian way.
The Episcopal priest presided with the other three of us acting as servers
along with him. That church had a couple of steps up to the chancel where the
Episcopal priest had performed the ritual of the Eucharist. It also had a short
rail around that chancel. We each received either a paten with wafers on it or
a cup with wine in it. We stood in the chancel behind that little rail. We were
separated from the people both physically and, to me at least, symbolically.
The priest invited the people to come forward to receive the elements of the
Eucharist. I and the other clergy were standing a couple of steps above the
people and behind the rail. Most of the people who came forward knelt on the
top chancel step on the other side of the rail from us. We served them either a
wafer or the wine from above and apart from them, or so it felt to me.
I was almost
overwhelmed by the power relationship that setup conveyed. There we clergy
were, robed and wearing vestments so everyone would know that we were clergy
representing our churches, standing slightly above and apart from the people.
Now, I know that the people who knelt before me to receive the Eucharist weren’t
really kneeling before me. They were kneeling before the Host, namely, Jesus
Christ, present symbolically or for some people in some other way in the wafer
and the wine. But it looked for all the world like they were kneeling before me
and my colleagues. I grew extremely uncomfortable. I thought, O my God! We are
saying to these people that we as the church have something you need for your
salvation. We can either give it to you or withhold it from you. If felt the
power that arrangement gave the church over the people, and I didn’t like it
one little bit.
In my church we
had no chancel rail. The chancel was up a couple of steps from the floor of the
sanctuary, but when we served Communion we stood on the floor in front of the
chancel on the same level as the people. In my church people didn’t kneel
before us. The symbolism of the sacrament in that church was far more
democratic that was the symbolism of the Episcopal service that Easter Saturday
evening. That evening I felt a power over people I didn’t want, that I knew was
perfectly inappropriate, and that I never wanted to feel ever again.
That, I think, is
a big part of why the church made both baptism and the Eucharist necessary for
people’s salvation. Jesus never did that, the church that claims to be his body
did. That move gave and gives the church immense power over the people. It puts
the church between the people and salvation, between the people and God. That
is a place I have no business being and have no desire to be. That is a place I’m
sure Jesus Christ doesn’t want me or anyone else to be. It is a place Jesus
Christ doesn’t want and never wanted his church to be. The Gospel of Mark tells
us that at the moment of Jesus’ death on the cross the temple of the curtain
was torn in two from top to bottom.[2]
That curtain separated the people from the Holy of Holies, the innermost part
of the temple where God was said to dwell. Jesus’ death took away everything
that stands between God and God’s people. Today Christ’s death tears that
little chancel rail in two. It gets the clergy off their high horse and off
that raised chancel. It is truly unfortunate (at best) that so much of the
Christian church does not understand that truth.
So who controls
salvation? God. God alone controls salvation. No church does. I most surely don’t,
and my ordination to the ministry of Jesus Christ changes that truth not one
whit. Neither does anyone else’ ordination be that person the poorest parish
priest in some remote part of South America or the Pope in Rome. Salvation
belongs to God alone. The church can exclude whoever it wants. It can deny the
Eucharist to President Biden because he supports a woman’s right to make her
own decisions about her own body. As far as salvation goes none of that means
anything. No one and no institution on earth controls salvation. Only God does.
Thanks be to God!
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