On Salvation

 

On Salvation

December 11, 2021

 

We’ve all heard it: “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved.” Many of us have been asked this one: “When were you saved?” I once knew a Presbyterian minister who answered that question, “About two thousand years ago.” I don’t think that’s entirely right either, but it’s snappy answer to what many of us think to be a stupid question. The expected answer to the question is a specific date and perhaps even time of day when you took Jesus as your Lord and Savior. We’ve all heard this one too: If you don’t take Jesus as your personal Lord and Savior your soul will spend eternity in agony in the fires of hell. Or even if you have taken Jesus as your personal Lord and Savior but continue to commit sin your soul will spend eternity in agony in the fires of hell. Maybe you’ve attended a worship service that included an altar call, a call to people in the congregation to come forward and take Jesus as their personal Lord and Savior. All of these understandings of salvation have one thing in common. They all place fences around salvation. They all restrict God’s act of salvation. They all have the souls of a great many or perhaps most people excluded from God’s salvation by something a person has done or not done, like believe on the Lord Jesus Christ. In all of them some people are saved and some people are damned. In all of them God’s grace, God’s salvation, is conditional. You get it if something or another. We’ve all heard it, haven’t we?

I am convinced that putting fences around God’s salvation is one of or perhaps the greatest bastardization of the Christian faith of which we Christians are guilty. It is a bastardization of the faith in several ways. It turns a faith of love and grace into a faith grounded in and operating on existential fear, the fear of damnation. It makes salvation something we get for ourselves in one way or another. It isn’t entirely something God gives us. Making salvation conditional means we get to decide what God is going to do. If we do life right God saves us. If we don’t live life right God will damn us. To these ways of thinking God has perhaps set the rules of the game, but how God applies those rules to us is entirely up to us not to God.

Conditional salvation, I believe, is one of the things that drive people away from Christianity. Who, after all, wants to live their life in an existential fear of damnation? No one. Who wants to be told that something about them, like their sexual orientation or gender identity, means they are doomed to damnation and there’s nothing they can do about it without denying a core part of their humanity? No one. Who wants to be part of a faith tradition that teaches them to hate some people because, it is claimed, those people are beyond salvation? No one, or at least I hope no one. Conditional salvation keeps a great many people from even considering Christianity much less deciding to live their relationship with God within it. Of course, I must concede that conditional salvation can bring people to the faith or at least to the church as well as drive them away from it. Conservative Christians use conditional salvation to scare people into the faith and into the church. They put bumper stickers on their cars like one a saw once with a border of flames and the question, “Where will you spend eternity?”

Yet fear is a lousy motivation for faith. It may cause people to say they have faith when they really don’t. Fear of damnation makes the faith ego-driven and ego-centered. It makes me live in fear of the ultimate fate of my soul. It may also include a fear for the eternal fate of other people’s souls too, but whether it includes fear for others or not it makes faith entirely individualistic. Each of us controls the fate of our souls. Much in conservative Christianity flows from that notion of individual control and the fear of getting it wrong.

OK, so conditional salvation has some negative consequences. We may or may not regret the fact that it does, but does the reality of negative consequences itself make conditional salvation false? No, it doesn’t necessarily make it false. Truths can have negative consequences too. Yet conditional salvation is false. It must be false if God is to be truly God. To understand the falsehood of conditional salvation, conditional grace, we’ll start by looking at something that is a foundational problem with Christianity generally (and for other faith traditions too for that matter).

In the nineteenth century many German writers undertook what today is known as “the first quest for the historical Jesus.” These writers sought to get behind the faith confessions of the Gospels (for faith confessions are what they really are) to discover who Jesus of Nazareth was as an historical person. In 1906 Albert Schweitzer (yes, that Albert Schweitzer) published a book with the intimidating German title Von Reimarus zu Wrede; eine Geschichte der Leben-Jesu- Forschung. It’s English translations have the much simpler title The Quest of the Historical Jesus. In that book Schweitzer concluded that any attempt at discovering the historical Jesus ends up with only a projection onto Jesus of the seeker’s own beliefs and ideas of who they want Jesus to have been. What’s going on in any search for the historical Jesus, Schweitzer said (I believe quite correctly) is more projection than scholarship.[1]

Historical Jesus seekers project their own human beliefs and prejudices onto Jesus, but that’s hardly the only projection that Christians routinely do. Christianity has projected human conceptions and ways not only onto Jesus but onto God essentially from the very beginning. The early Christian insistence that Jesus would return in power and glory is a good example. The Jesus of the Gospels didn’t exercise any kind of worldly power. In fact he preached against it. He thought God’s quiet, nonviolent power was more powerful than the earthly power of mighty empires. So instead of raising an army and driving the Romans into the sea or getting rid of the Romans through divine intervention he preached nonviolent love. He had no kind of earthly glory. Getting yourself crucified by the Romans (not the Jews) is hardly glorious. Jesus was an impoverished son of a carpenter (or stonemason) from a tiny, backwater village in the region called Galilee, itself hardly the scene of much earthly power or glory, with no earthly glory at all. John Dominic Crossan calls him a peasant. Whatever he was, he certainly had no glory. The Jesus we meet in the Gospels lived and acted according to the ways of God not the ways of the world.

Yet to both the Jews and the Greeks in the time shortly after Jesus those damned Romans were still there ruling, oppressing, and exploiting them. Both the Jews and the Greeks of that time thought that what they needed most of all was liberation from Roman exploitation. Yet Jesus had, as far as they could tell, done nothing to liberate them from the Romans. So they convinced themselves that he would return some day soon and get it right. He’d do it the worldly way not the divine way. He’d return as a mighty judge and avenger. He’d smite those Romans for them. The Romans wouldn’t stand a chance against divine power wielded in the human way of hatred and violence. Love? Well yes, love is lovely, but not if it meant they had to keep living under those damned Romans.

That early Christian expectation of Jesus returning in power and military might raises a crucial question: The early Christian communities that produced the Gospels knew that Jesus had not been an earthly kind of Messiah. He didn’t use military force to reestablish the kingdom of David. They knew that he preached and practiced nonviolence not violence. They knew that he preached and practiced love not hate. So what’s going on with their insistence that next time he’s come and do it right?

The only way I can explain it is through the psychological phenomenon of projection. Projection is the attribution of an observer’s ways, beliefs, or desires onto some other person. Without even knowing that we’re doing it we perceive another not to be who she really is but to be a reflection of our own beliefs, values, and desires. We see the other person not so much as who he actually is than as having characteristics we project onto her. Sometimes what we project is what we think we need. If we are angry we’re likely to see another person as angry. We project our anger onto them, and it matters not that the other person really isn’t angry at all. Projection happens in myriad ways, and we’re rarely if ever aware that we’re doing it.

That, I am convinced, is what was going on with the early Christian expectation of Christ coming again to get the world right. The next time, they thought, he’ll do it right. He’ll do it our way, He’d get rid of those damned Romans for us, and he’d use violence to do it. We think violence solves problems, so we project our own proclivity for violence onto a returning Christ. When we do we make Jesus Christ into something he never was and never would be. We make him not the prophet of nonviolence that he actually was but a very worldly warrior come to solve our problems for us.

I am convinced that the same psychological phenomenon is at work when Christians put limits around God’s salvation. We project onto God the way we think salvation should or even must work. We think of salvation as a reward, and to us no reward is free. We have to earn it. To us some people will earn the reward and others won’t. Some people deserve the reward and others don’t. Gifts may be freely given, but rewards aren’t. To us, getting the reward is an incentive, probably the only incentive, for doing what the person or institution bestowing the reward wants us to do. Desire for the reward can also get us not to do what the person or institution bestowing the reward wants us not to do. Without the prospect of a reward we’d do whatever we want to do, not what the one giving the reward wants us to do. To us, there are limits around the bestowing of the reward. You have to do something (which often includes not doing something) to get it. Not everyone will get it. In fact, most people won’t get it, for there is only so much reward to go around. Those of us who do get it are the winners, the in group. Those who don’t get it are just losers whom we shun and even condemn.

For nearly two millennia now Christianity has projected that view of the dynamics of reward onto God. To most Christians salvation is not God’s free gift to all people. It is a reward a few people earn and most people don’t. We earn it by believing the right things and not believing the wrong things and by doing the right things and not doing the wrong things. When we put limits around salvation we turn God in a cosmic rewarder. This notion says that when we earn salvation God gives it to us, and we don’t God doesn’t.

Here’s the thing though. That way of looking at salvation is entirely human, and God is not human. God is not human writ large. God certainly isn’t less than human. Rather, God is infinitely more than human. God transcends humanity absolutely. God doesn’t operate the way most humans do. God doesn’t work within an if/then system of earning and reward. How do we know that God doesn’t? The best way to understand God is to consider what it is to be human, then understand that that’s not who God is. The Old Testament book of Isaiah says it succinctly: “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord.” Isaiah 55:8 NRSV. We see that the world considers salvation to be an earned reward. That, essentially, is how we know that God doesn’t consider salvation to be an earned reward.

So if to God salvation isn’t a reward, what is it? To this point I have intentionally avoided using the word that best conveys to us what salvation is to God and how it operates. That word is grace. Grace is God’s love in action. Grace in this sense is a free gift not an earned reward. In the if/then  way of the world we’d have to earn God’s grace, but if we have to earn it, it isn’t a free gift. It is a reward not grace. Grace is distinguished from reward by being freely given not earned. Consider this: To us humans earning a reward is a good thing, but our conception of good is but a pale shadow of God’s conception of good. We humans are capable of doing good things, but God’s good is infinitely better than our good. God’s good is so limitless that we can never grasp the full extent of it. Yet if we believe that God desires only the good for creation, and God does, then the good that God does for creation will so far exceed our good that we’ll have a hard time understanding it. We’ll think no, that has to be wrong. That’s not how we understand good, so we think it can’t be how God understands good—but it is. We need to get used to the idea that God’s good is infinitely better than our good.

Now apply that understanding to the concept of salvation. God’s going to understand salvation in a way that just seems wrong to us. But we need to ask: What would make salvation infinitely better than our concept of it as a reward? Well, removing the requirement that we must earn it would do that, and that is indeed how God does it. God gives us salvation freely. Unconditionally. Without requirements from our side. God’s salvation isn’t earned, it’s just there. Always, and it always has been. We humans think we have to earn salvation as a reward. God says no, I’ll go you one better. I’ll give it to you freely and unconditionally so that you don’t have to worry about earning it. And that really is better, isn’t it?

The truth that salvation is God’s free gift of grace means more than that we don’t have to earn it. If God’s grace is truly unconditional, and it is, then it must be universal. Unconditional grace means that everyone is saved and always has been. If God’s grace is unconditional, and it is, then the dynamic of salvation not be if Jesus, then salvation; and that is indeed not God’s dynamic of salvation. Jesus is irrelevant to the presence of God’s grace. Jesus didn’t bring or create divine grace, but he did give us the most powerful demonstration of God’s love for us, God’s grace of course being grounded in and arising from God’s love. In Jesus Christ, God the Son Incarnate, God enters into the worst that humans can and do inflict on other humans. Did God then lash out at the Roman executioners who imposed  such agony and eventually death on Jesus? Not at all. Rather God gave us to know that God is with us no matter what.[2] Jesus didn’t bring salvation. Rather, In Jesus we see and come to know God’s salvation, the universal, unconditional salvation that has always been God’s free gift to humanity and always will be.

I’ve been preaching and teaching God’s unconditional, universal grace for quite a long time now, so I’ve heard the objections people raise to it. One of the most common and significant objections to it is that it takes away our motivation to lead good, relatively sinless lives. People ask: If I’m as saved if I do whatever the hell I want as I am if I live the life of a saint, why shouldn’t I commit as much adultery as I want, steal whatever I want, and murder people I don’t like? You say that there is no ultimate negative consequence from such acts. So, while I may have to deal with earthly law enforcement agencies if I break secular laws, there’s no ultimate negative  consequence of those things that comes from God, right? Yes, right, but here’s the answer to that objection. If you really know in your heart and in your soul that God loves you so much that God has already saved you, it will never occur to you to do those or other evil things. Rather, you will respond to God’s love with love, the love of God, of other people, and even of yourself (ourselves being for many of us that hardest person of all to love). Unconditional grace doesn’t remove all motivation to proper living, but it does change it. It changes it from earning salvation to responding to God’s love the way you know God wants you to respond to it.

I’ve often heard another objection that certainly has an emotional appeal. This objection is often put this way: “You mean Hitler is saved!?” It is hard for us humans to imagine that God doesn’t punish the human monsters of world history. My response is that we can’t imagine it because our notion of love is so very much smaller than God’s notion of live. I have no doubt that atrocities like the Holocaust, Stalin’s intentional starvation of millions of people to force them to accept collectivized agriculture, or the killing fields of Pol Pot’s Cambodia hurt and anger God. How can they not? To our human way of thinking the hurt people inflict on other people must lead to punishment. That’s how our earthly systems of criminal law work. You commit a crime, you get punished. It’s a pure if/then system. But like I’ve already said here, God doesn’t operate with an if/then system.

Do the souls of monsters like Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, and so many others face some sort of divine disapproval after death? I don’t know. Maybe they do. What I do know is that those souls are not damned to an agonizing eternity in hell. I’m fond of a statement I’ve seen attributed to Pope Paul VI: “I believe that there is a hell, but I’m not sure there’s anyone in it,” but I go a step farther. I don’t’ believe that there even is a hell. A God who is love, and God is love, would never create anything like the hell of the traditional Christian imagination. Yes, I know there are references to something like hell in the Bible, especially in the Gospel of Matthew. OK. That was Matthew’s idea. It doesn’t have to be ours. Some say that the scorn of others in heaven and a new awareness of just how evil than had been in their lives is the punishment human monsters get. Maybe so, though we don’t and really can’t know what heaven is like. I do know this. God’s love of humanity is so infinitely greater than ours that no one is damned for all eternity the way Christianity has always said many people are.

So God’s grace is absolutely without condition, and the salvation that flows from that grace too is absolutely without condition. They have to be because they flow from God’s love which is so vast we can’t really comprehend it. Moreover, if grace is conditional it isn’t grace. The hoary Christian notion that we must somehow earn salvation is nothing but a projection of human ways onto God where they don’t belong. So let’s stop projection shall we? Let’s let God be God. Let’s stop reducing God to a human being writ large. Yes, it’s hard for most of us to get our heads around unconditional salvation. It’s hard because unconditional salvation so far transcends our human notions of salvation. But then God vastly transcends any human conception of God. If we will stop reducing God to the human we may actually come closer to God then we have ever been. May it be so.

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[1] Many people in the more progressive Christian traditions like my own United Church of Christ like the work of the Jesus Seminar, a contemporary group of scholars seeking the historical Jesus behind the Gospels. Fans of the Jesus Seminar don’t like hearing it, but that group is essentially as open to Schweitzer’s criticism as were the nineteenth century writers Schweitzer criticized.

[2] For a fuller discussion of this concept see Chapter 9, “The Meaning of the Cross: The Demonstration of God’s Solidarity,” in my book Liberating the Bible, Overcoming Obstacles to Faith in the New Millennium, Revised Edition, available in paperback and electronic form from amazon.com.