Did Jesus Bring Salvation?

 

Did Jesus Bring Salvation?

December 11, 2021

 

In my recent post on this blog titled “On Salvation” I said that Jesus didn’t bring salvation. Seven hundred years ago saying that would have gotten me burned at the stake. Fortunately, I can say it today with no consequence other than a majority of Christians labeling me a heretic, but they have no power to harm me for it. Besides, heretics are more interesting than orthodox people anyway. it’s an idea I’ve had for a long time. It just doesn’t make sense to me to say that God didn’t save people for millennia until in a certain place at a certain time something happened that caused (or allowed) God to start forgiving people. Anselm of Canterbury, the source of the most common western Christian understanding of salvation as Jesus’ substitutionary sacrificial atonement, may have believed that in the twelfth century CE. I don’t. I think some of the early Christians saw the problem with saying salvation came only with Jesus. They dealt with the problem by making up the “harrowing of hell,” a claim that in the time between his crucifixion and his resurrection Jesus descended to hell to rescue the souls of the righteous who had died before he came along. There’s no warrant for that story in the Gospels, but I guess that didn’t bother the Christians who needed it to deal with the absence of salvation before Jesus came along.

As is so often the case with traditional Christian notions, this issue calls for a far more radical solution than the one the harrowing of hell gives us. That more radical solution is this: God’s salvation has been present at least as long as the universe has existed. Salvation didn’t come into existence with Jesus. It’s always been there. People who lived before Jesus weren’t damned to hell because Jesus hadn’t come along yet. That they were so damned simply makes no sense. Did God become love only with the coming of Jesus? Of course not. God has always been love. Would a God who is love condemn souls to hell just because something that was going to happen in the future hadn’t happened yet? Of course not. People who lived before Jesus were as saved as people after Jesus. If God is who we say God is, it simply is not possible that they weren’t.

I know that this concept is eternal salvation is hard for many Christians to accept. Here’s one way around the problem, In this discussion we’re using the terms before and after. Those are of course terms that refer to time as we know it. We exist, or at least perceive that we exist, in a reality that includes time. Time, then, is a characteristic of created existence. Yet while God is Creator of our existence and all of its characteristics, God is not bound by the limitations of created existence. God is present in created existence, but God also infinitely subsists beyond created existence. God’s reality transcends categories of created existence like time. For God in God’s character as transcendent time doesn’t exist. Therefore the categories before and after don’t exist. For God as transcendent it makes no sense to speak of before Jesus and after Jesus. For God as transcendent nothing exists in time, for God transcends time. For God as transcendent the things of created existence don’t exist in time, they just exist.

It is difficult or even impossible for most of us to imagine a reality beyond time. Yet sometimes some people do experience a reality beyond time. People adept at the spiritual practice of transcendental meditation speak of losing time when they are deep into that practice. I’m not adept at meditation, but I did once have an experience of losing time. I used to be a lawyer, and for a time I had an office high in the tallest skyscraper in downtown Seattle. I had a spectacular view of the Cascade Mountains to the east and of Mount Rainier (which we really should rename to Tahoma, its name, or one of them in the indigenous cultures of the area) to the south. I got to the office early one winter morning. The sun was just coming up. The sky to the east was all red and pink and orange in the magical hour before the sun rises enough to wash all that color out of the sky. I thought I’d just sit and enjoy the view before getting to work. So I relaxed, sat in my desk chair, and gazed at the view. At what I thought was hardly any time at all later I looked at my watch. Forty-five minutes had gone by. I was surprised to say the least. I had had no perception of the passage of that much time. In my gazing at one of the most spectacularly beautiful sights in all creation I had lost time. That is, I had lost the experience of the passage of time. On the ordinary level of existence time had passed. In what must have been a transcendental state of some sort, for me time had simply not existed. I can easily imagine that that’s how it always is with God. Like I said, in that state of being it makes no sense to use the terms before and after. For God salvation neither existed before Jesus nor came to be after Jesus because the terms before and after simply don’t exist for God in God’s nature as transcendent.

That understanding of the transcendental irrelevance of the concept of time may help you understand the concept of eternal salvation. If it does, good. Yet surely most of us are still stuck with the problem of understanding how God’s salvation could not have existed before Jesus as Christianity usually insists was the case. A simpler and more readily understandable resolution of that issue is to say the Jesus didn’t bring salvation. God’s salvation was already there when Jesus came along and always had been. However, that understanding of the matter raises question of whether Jesus has any role to play in salvation at all and if so what that role is. To that question we now turn.

I’m a Christian. Indeed, I’m an ordained Christian minister, albeit now retired. I certainly am not going to say or believe that Jesus Christ has no role to play in God’s dynamic of salvation. Yet if Jesus didn’t bring salvation because salvation was already there, what could his role possibly be? The answer to that question is something called theology of the cross. Theology of the cross is an alternative understanding of the soteriology, that is, the understanding of the dynamic of salvation, that says Jesus suffered and died to atone for human sin and thus made salvation possible, that of course being the standard, orthodox Protestant understanding of the soteriology of Jesus Christ. Theology of the cross says that Christ didn’t make salvation possible, rather he demonstrated in fullest measure how God in truth relates to creation. As God the Son Incarnate Jesus suffered rank injustice, unspeakable agony, and death at the hands of the dominant earthly imperial power of his time and place, namely of course, Rome. In him God entered into and experienced in God’s own person the worst human beings to do each other. In doing that God showed us through Jesus that God doesn’t prevent suffering in this life. Rather, God enters into our suffering with us and is present with us in unshakable solidarity no matter what happens. Theology of the cross, for example, answers the question of where God was during the Holocaust by saying God was in the cattle cars. God was in the “showers” in which the Nazis killed an unimaginable number of people simply because those people were Jews. God was in the furnaces as the Nazis burned the bodies of those they had killed to ashes. Theology of the cross says that no, God doesn’t prevent evil, as much as we’d like God to do that. Rather, it says that in Jesus Christ we see and can fully understand that God is here with us. Period. Always. That’s Christ’s role in the dynamic of salvation.

Understanding the saving work of Jesus that way is perfectly consistent with God’s salvation always having been there. Jesus, didn’t bring it or create it, he showed us in the most powerful way possible that God and God’s salvation are always there, always have been there, and always will be there. God and God’s salvation were there before Jesus. They have been there after Jesus. For that demonstration we can all say, Thanks be to God!