Universalism? Really?

 

Universalism? Really?

September 30, 2022

 

I have long considered myself to be a universalist. By that I have meant that God loves, forgives, and accepts everyone equally, even the great human monsters of which there have been and are so many. I have contended and taught and preached that God is a God of grace not a God of judgment and punishment. I have believed, and I have said many times, that grace is not grace if it is conditional, that is, if it is not universal, if it depends on anything we do or don’t do. Making grace conditional changes it from grace to reward, from God’s free gift into earned payment. I have said that a system of earned merit and reward is human not divine. I have often quoted Isaiah 55:8-9 for the proposition that God’s thoughts are not our thoughts, and God’s ways are not our ways. I have believed, and have often said, that if you want to know God’s thoughts and ways, look for the opposite of earthly thoughts and ways. The opposite of earned merit and reward is universal grace. Since the human way is of earned reward not free gift, we know that God’s way is not earned merit and reward. We know that God’s way is the free, unearned, unmerited gift of grace, a gift of love beyond our understanding. That’s what I have believed and taught for quite a long time now.

And these days that belief has been so battered by my awareness of past and contemporary human evil that I have experienced that belief being shaken in a profound way. I have felt my commitment to that belief wavering. I have found myself asking: Really? You have said that God does not require anyone to earn grace. You have said that God doesn’t punish sin, God forgives it. All of it. Period. No matter what. But how can that be? Does God not see all the evil in the world? Does God not care about the harm people cause to other people? Really?

My battering today comes from one new example of human evil and one about which I have known a good deal for a long time but that has become more vivid and powerful for me through the work of the great Ken Burns. The recent appearance of human evil to which I refer is the behavior of Russian soldiers in Ukraine. It seems beyond doubt that they have committed an enormous number of war crimes against Ukrainian civilians. They have murdered hundreds if not thousands of innocent people. They have raped women and girls. I want to like the Russians. I have a PhD in their history. I have lived among them doing historical research. I know the greatness of Russian culture both high and folk. I want to like them, but today I can’t. What the Russians are doing in Ukraine has appalled me so much that I have exclaimed: God damn them! God, I would damn them if I could, but I can’t. You can. So do it. But does God damn them? If not, why the hell not? How can God not damn them?

Yet the evil the Russians are committing in Ukraine pales in comparison to the incomprehensible horror Ken Burns describes in his latest PBS documentary “The U.S. and the Holocaust.” As he has done so brilliantly when considering other historical phenomena, Burns makes the horror of the Holocaust personal. Knowing that the Nazis murdered six millions of Jews (and an enormous number of other people too) is one thing. Hearing the stories of particular human beings who escaped but lost loved ones in the German genocide of the Jews is something quite different.[1] Photographs and film of Germans in uniform shooting large groups of helpless people are so much more powerful than mere statistics. The horror of what the Germans did to the Jews and to millions of other people as well can perhaps be explained by considering Nazi ideology, of which they made no secret. Yet that horror is so enormous that it shakes whatever conviction I ever had of the goodness of humanity. Good people don’t force millions of other people into gas chambers, then nonchalantly turn a valve to release the gas that will kill them.

I have a fair amount of experience living with the German people. When I was eleven years old, in 1957-58, only twelve to thirteen years after World War II ended, I lived with my family in an apartment in Berlin, Germany, while my father, a professor of history at the University of Oregon, did historical research. Our landlady was a widow, but her late husband had been a member of the Nazi party. One day she opened a wardrobe that stood in the large entry space of the apartment we shared with her. There hung her late husband’s Nazi party uniform. It wasn’t a stage or movie prop. It was the real thing. She took the armband off the uniform, the armband we’ve all seen in movies, a black swastika in a white circle on a red armband. She tried to put it on me. I guess she thought it would be fun. Yet at the tender age of 11 I already knew at least a little about what that despicable symbol represented. I wouldn’t let her put it on me. I’m quite sure she didn’t understand why I wouldn’t. My family and I saw in her some of how the horror of Nazism had happened. One day she said to us, “Yes, it is too bad what happened to the Jews, but then something did have to be done.”[2] Those words express the sanguine acceptance of the Nazi libel of the Jewish people that made the Holocaust possible.

In later years, though still in my youth, I lived in Germany for two additional academic years. I have enjoyed my time in Germany. I learned a lot living there. I know the towering achievements of the German people is every field of constructive human endeavor from nuclear physics to metaphysical philosophy. I can and do appreciate much of German culture. I cannot forgive the Germans for the Holocaust. I don’t understand how God could forgive them for it either. Yet I have long insisted that God has done precisely that. Today I’m asking myself in a way I never have before, is that right? And if it is, how can it be? I fear I will find the teaching here as difficult as I suspect everyone else will.

The only defensible answers to the question of whether my Christian universalism is right is yes. Yes, God has forgiven even the monsters among us. The answer to how that can be is that the consequences of not doing it are worse than the consequences of doing it. There certainly are negative things that flow from this answer of yes. God forgiving everyone and everything can give the impression that God doesn’t care about the evil things we humans do. We can conclude that it is permissible for us to do whatever we want even if it results in the deaths of hundreds, thousands, or even millions of people. Universalism of this sort leaves us needing to figure out why we shouldn’t just sin abundantly. It leaves us needing to figure out whether there is still some way in which God punishes sin. These are serious consequences indeed of God forgiving everyone for everything. I’ll have more to say about them below.

What are the consequences of God not forgiving everyone for everything? Those consequences are actually far more radical than are the consequences of universalism. Our thinking that God does not forgive everyone for everything turns God from the totaliter aliter spiritual reality that God must be into nothing more than a human being functioning on a cosmic scale. When we say there are things God does not and cannot forgive, we make God be just like us only bigger. I said just now that I cannot forgive the Germans for the Holocaust, and indeed I cannot. But I cannot because I am human not a god. I cannot forgive the Germans for the Holocaust because I operate within what is a nearly universal human system of reward and punishment. We all operate within that system. We live within a moral system that says rewards must be earned and misdeeds must be punished. We call that system justice. Why, for example, do so many Americans object to the government making welfare payments to people in need and why are those payments so paltry? Because the people who receive those benefits have not earned them. Why do so many Americans support imposing severe punishments on convicted criminals up to and including the legalized murder we call capital punishment? Because a criminal has by definition committed a wrong, and justice, we think, requires that we punish that wrong. In this system we think, correctly, that the Germans committed a wrong of nearly cosmic proportions when they carried out the intentional, industrialized slaughter of millions upon millions of people. We conclude from that undeniable truth that the Germans must be punished severely for what they did. In reality of course, the only punishment the Germans received for what they did other than have their country essentially destroyed in war is that, at least in what we came to call West Germany, the people were made to see what they had done. That’s because we in the West needed Germany as an ally against Soviet expansion in Europe. That truth, however, does not obviate the fact that we think the Germans deserve, or at least in past years deserved, severe punishment for horrendous crimes. That’s the human way of doing things. It is also the way we humans expect and perhaps even want God to do things.

When we have God doing things our way, however, we bring God down to our level of being. We make God entirely too human. We make God entirely too small. Sure, this human God we have created operates on a cosmic scale, a scale far larger than any scale on which we can act. But that difference in size does not create a difference in essence. To this way of thinking, God may function like a human being writ cosmically large, but God is still functioning like a human being.

Yet whatever God may be, God is not a human being, not even a human being writ cosmically large. There is a passage in the Bible that expresses this truth clearly and powerfully. I’ve already mentioned it, but it’s worth quoting here. It is Isaiah 55:8-9. These verses have God say,

 

For my thoughts are not your

thoughts,

     nor are your ways my says, says

the Lord.

For as the heavens are higher than

the earth,

     so are my ways higher than your

ways

     and my thoughts higher than your thoughts. NRSV

 

Isaiah is right. God just isn’t like us. That means that when we make God be like us, we make God not be God.[3] It necessarily follows that God forgives everyone for everything. If there is anyone or anything that God does not forgive, then God is operating through a human system of merit and reward, wrong and punishment.[4]

Applied to the question of grace and divine forgiveness of sin, that human system of reward and punishment must have within it some criteria on which to make the distinction between salvation and damnation. What might those criteria be? A person’s intrinsic characteristics such as race, gender, sexual orientation or expression, etc., cannot be the criterion under which God operates, for God created all human beings as equal. See, for example, Genesis 1:26-27. The distinction between those who are forgiven and those who are not forgiven must be based on something the person does that is prohibited or does not do that is required.

The major flaw in that way of understanding how God works is that it is a human way not a divine one. There are, however, other flaws in it as well. People who understand God this way generally consider the criteria for salvation or damnation to exist in one of two categories, i.e., belief and acts. A great many Christians insist that one is saved if one believes in Jesus Christ and damned if one doesn’t. Yet most humans who have ever lived have never heard of Jesus Christ, or, if they have heard of him, they have never had any reason to accept the conservative Christian contention that they had to take him as their personal Lord and Savior or spend eternity in the fiery torments of hell. Most humans who have ever lived have lived in cultures that have had their own systems of symbols and myths through which, if they find it all, they find their connection with the spiritual dimension of reality that we call God. They have, therefore, never had the thought in their heads that they had to accept all of the cognitive beliefs that so many Christians insist they must have in order to avoid damnation. It is inconceivable that a God who is love would damn these people to hell because they lived in a time and/or place where Jesus was completely unknown or where belief in Jesus was never preached as the way to salvation. If God requires belief in Jesus as a prerequisite for salvation, God is an arbitrary monster condemning innocent people for something that in them just isn’t a fault.

Most Christians also insist that sin of which a person is guilty which the person has not confessed and of which she has not repented is a reason for God to cast that person into eternal damnation. This contention fails for a couple of reasons beyond the fact that it is human not divine. It fails first of all because no human being who ever lived but one has lived a life entirely free of sin, that of course being Jesus Christ.[5] Yes, most of the time we are able to confess and repent of our sin, but that isn’t always the case. A person who has sinned may die before being aware that they have sinned and thus have died before having confessed and repented of that sin. Sometimes a person dies suddenly and unexpectedly, a sudden, unexpected death leaving no time for confession and repentance. Moreover, it just isn’t as clear as proponents of this theory assert just what sin is. Conservative Christians point to the Bible and say it tells us what sin is. Yet the Bible is full of contradictions, and many of the things it calls sin are nothing but ancient cultural understandings of sin that make no sense in today’s world. The life conditions and circumstances of people today are so different from those of biblical times that what may have been a necessary moral proscription then is not one now. A person having or not having sinned without confession and repentance simply cannot be the criterion God uses to save some and damn others.

None of the arguments against universalism holds up under even modest critical scrutiny. There are, however, still some big issues that universalism raises that we must address. One is the sense universalism can give that God doesn’t care about human evil. After all, how much can God care about it if God doesn’t punish it? Yet we know that God cares immensely about human evil. In Jesus Christ we see God denouncing evil every chance he got. We see God on the cross taking human evil into God’s own being and demonstrating God’s presence with us in whatever evil other humans inflict us with. In the Bible we see God again and again trying to get us humans to avoid doing evil things. Why would God do that if God didn’t care about human evil? We must simply accept the fact that God not punishing evil does not mean that God doesn’t care about it.

Another issue is how hard it is for us to believe that God doesn’t punish even humans who have committed massive crimes against humanity like Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin. How can God save and accept them in the same way God saves and accepts the great human saints or even just us ordinary people? To some extent I am an agnostic on this issue. I do, however, believe certain things about it to be true. God does not condemn even Adolf Hitler or Heinrich Himmler to an eternity of torment in hell. A God of love could never condemn anyone for all eternity.[6] If God does in some way punish them, God does not do it for the sake of punishment. If God punishes them at all, surely God does it only for the sake of correction not for the sake of punishment. I have known people who believe that the punishment sinners of any sort receive after death is the guilt and remorse they feel about their sin when they see divine love in the presence of God. I don’t know if that’s true or not. I suppose it is as good as any theory we can concoct about punishment after death that retains the sacred truth that God is love.

A third great issue we must address is the question of the effect universalism has on people’s motivation for good behavior. This is perhaps the biggest issue universalism raises at all. I have already mentioned it briefly, but it requires greater attention here. Once when I was teaching universal salvation to a group of people from the church I served as pastor one of those good folk said to me, “Tom, you’re taking away every reason to be good,” or words to that effect. This comment, with which I suspect several others in the group agreed, reveals the motivation selective salvation gives people for behaving themselves. That motivation is the fear of damnation if they somehow fail to live up to whatever standard they have been told they must meet in order to be saved. Universal salvation does indeed obviate that reason for avoiding sin. It does not, however, eliminate all reasons for us not to sin. It just replaces the motivation of fear with the motivation of love.

The God of universalism is a God of love. Pure love. Boundless love. Love beyond human understanding. One of the primary purposes of religion in a universalist system is to lead people into a deep, existential awareness of that love. Into awareness, that is, that they stand always and irrevocably in God’s divine love. The Christian universalist knows deep in her being that God has forgiven whatever wrongs she may have committed even before she asks God to forgive her. He even knows that God has forgiven his sin even before he has committed the sin. The Christian universalist knows that not only she but all creation lives immersed in God’s love. He is surrounded by that love every minute of every day. Christian universalists know that God’s love frees them and everyone else to be the fearless agents of God’s love in and for the world that God calls them to be. The Christian universalist knows that God’s love as the greatest gift there is or ever could be.

So how does the Christian universalist respond to God’s love? By sinning abundantly so that grace may abound? By no means! See Romans 6:1-2. The divine love of God evokes a response of gratitude and a commitment to live a life of love in the world to the fullest extent of one’s capability. Universalism doesn’t leave us with no motive for good behavior. It does, however, change what that motive is. Of course, it leaves us free not to respond to love with love, but it trusts the spirit within those who believe not to sin insofar as they are able. And, of course, it assures us all of God’s unshakable love and forgiveness when we sin, even when we sin abundantly.

So, do horrendous things like Russian war crimes or even things orders of magnitude more horrendous like the Holocaust result in a person’s damnation rather than salvation. No, they do not. They cannot. Yes, I know. It is very hard for us humans to accept that contention. Though I have taught and preached universalism for years, I too struggle with accepting it. Accepting it is indeed hard, but as a great mentor of mine once said, there is no simple religion. In faith we encounter and sometimes wrestle with the divine. See Genesis 32:22-30. I too wrestle with the consequences of universalism. I too am human, which means I want to see wrongdoing, especially genocidal wrongdoing, punished. But I am not God. Neither are you, and God is not us. God is not and cannot be bound by our small, human way of doing things. Both all my human logic and my faith in Jesus Christ lead me to the belief that God’s salvation is indeed universal. All of us are saved. Every last person who has ever lived or ever will live is saved. With God it cannot be otherwise. And for that great blessing, let all the people say, “Amen!”

---

[1] Years ago I was practicing law in a legal services program that served low income people free of charge. One of my clients was an elderly Jewish woman who other people in my office thought was a bit nuts but who I found quite engaging. One day I was driving her home from an appointment we had. We passed a bus stop. Another elderly woman was standing at it apparently waiting for the bus. My client mentioned that woman by name and said “She’s a Holocaust survivor.” I felt my stomach turn and felt some personal guilt for what that woman had experienced even though I am not German and wasn’t born until after the Holocaust ended. I am, after all, white and a Christian. The people who perpetrated the Holocaust were white, and many of them considered themselves to be Christians. I cannot entirely avoid guilt by association.

[2] None of us responded to what she had said. Today I wish I had responded this way: No, Annamarie, it is not “too bad” what happened to the Jews. It was one of the greatest tragedies in the sordid history humankind. And no, it didn’t “happen to the Jews.” You Germans did it to the Jews. There was nothing passive about it. And no, nothing had to be done. To believe that something had to be done about the Jews you had to believe the great Nazi lie that the very small number of German Jews wielded great power and were responsible for everything that was wrong with the country. That was indeed a lie, and you Germans bought it hook, line, and sinker.

[3] The Incarnation of God in Jesus Christ is an exception to this rule. But in the Incarnation God is breaking the rule. We humans aren’t breaking it. Moreover, in becoming human in Jesus God at the same time both breaks and preserves God’s essence as totaliter aliter. Only God can do that.

[4] There is one other possibility. God could be acting in a totally arbitrary way. I find that notion profoundly offensive and false. I will not consider it further here.

[5] Not every Christian accepts the notion that Jesus lived without sin. Those who don’t say that of course he sinned, he was after all human. If he never experienced an awareness of his own sin, he didn’t experience a fully human life. I won’t consider the merit of this contention here.

[6] I acknowledge that this sentence suggests the hoary Catholic notion of purgatory, something Protestants have never accepted because it isn’t biblical. So be it.

Russia and Ukraine Redux

 

Russia and Ukraine Redux

September 30, 2022

 

I have written about Russia and Ukraine before, using my knowledge of Russian history, in which I hold a PhD. I write about the relationship between those two nationalities and their present political embodiments again because the issues between them just become more and more complex. When Russia invaded Ukraine in March of this year your humble author and just about every expert on Russian affairs assumed that the Russians would easily defeat the Ukrainians militarily. After all, Russia is a very much bigger country than Ukraine. It has a much bigger population. It has a much bigger military. It has an enormous stockpile of nuclear weapons. Ukraine has existed as a country recognized as such under international law only since late 1991 following the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Many ethnic Russians live in Ukraine. A war between Russia and Ukraine looked like an enormous mismatch. But it hasn’t turned out to be a mismatch at all. The Ukrainians are resisting the Russian invasion far more effectively than most anyone thought they could. In recent times they have even regained some territory they had lost to the Russians earlier in the conflict. But just today Russia has claimed to have annexed Ukrainian districts that make up the entire eastern part of the country. So here’s another take on the relationship between Russia and Ukraine. There should be no real issues between those two closely related people, but of course there are, and we cannot ignore them.

This afternoon I had a regular appointment with my dentist. He said something about how remarkable it is that in 2022 one nation is trying to take over another nation, meaning Russia’s attack on Ukraine. I said yes, I have a PhD in the history of one of them. He asked me if Russia had any claim on Ukraine. I didn’t have time to give him an answer. I said only that the Russian and Ukrainian populations overlap. They intermix. There is no clear dividing line between them. I said that it is the eastern border of Ukraine that is primarily at issue, that Russian bureaucrats in Moscow drew that border, and that there is nothing natural about it. That’s what ‘s leading to a lot of the trouble there. My dentist put the question of the relationship of Russia and Ukraine in an interesting way. He asked whether Russia has any claim on Ukraine. That question is more complex than it might at first appear to be. The answer under international law is simply no. Russia has no rightful claim to any of Ukraine’s territory. From the perspective of Russian and Ukrainian history the answer is still no, but the matter is a bit more complex. I will attempt here to explain why that relationship is as fraught as it is.

The ethnic Ukrainians are every bit as ancient as a people as are the ethnic Russians. In fact, centuries ago there was no distinction between them. They were both just the one Eastern Slavic people. What we study as Russian history began in Kiev (Kyiv in Ukrainian). That history, at least in documentary form, begins with the conversion of Grand Prince Vladimir of Kiev to Orthodox Christianity in 988 CE. In the eleventh century CE the center of Slavic civilization shifted to the northeast of Kiev to the cities of Yaroslavl, Suzdal, and eventually Moscow. The territory that today is Ukraine entered a long and complex history of occupation and domination by peoples other than Eastern Slavs. These include the Crimean Tatars, the Poles, and the Lithuanians among others. Some ethnic Eastern Slavic people ended up living, at different times, in Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, and Romania as borders in the region were redrawn several times. For many centuries few if any of them lived under Russian control.

Beginning at least by the eighteenth century CE, the Russian Empire, which had grown and expanded extensively from Moscow in all four directions, began to occupy parts of the territory we now recognize as Ukraine. By 1789 Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia (though she was herself German not Russian) occupied Crimea, and all of what is now Ukraine came under Russian domination. What today are the Ukrainian lands were incorporated into the Russian Empire.

In its imperial period, which lasted until 1917, Russia never recognized the Ukrainians as a distinct people with a distinct language and culture that differed from the Russians. There was no distinct Ukrainian political unit of any kind within the empire. Indeed, in the nineteenth century the imperial Russian government outlawed the use of Ukrainian in education and banned the publication of literature in Ukrainian. The Russians in this period always claimed that there was no distinct Ukrainian nationality. To the Russians Ukrainians were really Russians who just spoke a rather odd dialect of Russian. Ukrainian nationalism arose in the nineteenth century, but the Ukrainians were never able to assert any kind of independence from the imperial government in St. Petersburg.

The Russian Empire ended in early 1917, and in November (October old style), 1917, the Russian Bolsheviks under Vladimir Lenin, staged a coup d’état in St. Petersburg that the Soviet Union would always celebrate as the Great October Revolution, though it was initially nothing of the sort. There followed a long civil war in which the Bolsheviks fought against various anti-Bolshevik enemies. Some of those enemies were Ukrainian nationalists fighting to free Ukraine from Russian control. They never succeeded for long in doing so. The Bolsheviks eventually won the civil war and established their control over most of what had been the Russian Empire, including Ukraine.

In 1922 the Russian Communist Party created the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Initially there were five so-called republics. One of them was the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. It was imposed on the Ukrainian people by the Russian-dominated Soviet Communist Party, but it was the first nominally Ukrainian political entity in history. The borders of the five “republics” were, like everything else in the Soviet Union, set by Communist bureaucrats in Moscow. They faced a difficult task in determining what lands were Russian and what lands were Ukrainian. The Russian and Ukrainian people were extensively intermingled with each other. There were Russian-speaking people as well as Ukrainian-speaking people throughout what became the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. There were Ukrainian-speaking people in the Russian republic. The overlap of the Russians and the Ukrainians was particularly pronounced in what became the eastern part of the Ukrainian republic. The Soviets set the border between Russia and Ukraine where it is today except that initially they put the Crimean Peninsula in the Russian Republic not the Ukrainian one. In 1954 Nikita Khrushchev transferred that peninsula to the Ukrainian SSR.

Thus from 1922 until 1991 there was a Ukrainian political entity, the Ukrainian SSR. It was, however, completely dominated by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which was itself primarily a Russian institution. When the Soviet Union was terminated on December 25, 1991, the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic became the independent nation of Ukraine. The international community, including Russia, recognized Ukraine as a sovereign nation under international law. It was the first time in history that such a sovereign Ukrainian state had existed and been recognized as such by the entire world.

Russia respected the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine from 1991 until 2014, when Russia forcibly, and illegally, incorporated Crimea into Russia. By 2014 Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin had been effectively ruling Russia since January 1, 2000. Putin is a complex character, but we get a lot of insight into an important part of his thinking from the comment he once made that the dissolution of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the twentieth century. Putin was once a member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and he was an agent of the Soviet institution charged with keeping the Communists in power, namely, the KGB. (The letters KGB are the first letters of the Russian words for the Committee on State Security, the Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopastnosti.) He was perhaps never all that committed as a Communist, but he was committed to the Soviet Union. In his mind, Russia is entitled to dominate if not outright control all of the lands and people that once made up the USSR. That, of course, includes Ukraine. Beyond that, Ukraine seems to hold a special attraction for Putin. He advocates the old imperial Russian understanding of Ukraine and Ukrainians. He denies that the Ukrainians are a people distinct from the Russians. He denies Ukraine’s right to exist as a nation separate from Russia. Moreover, he fears any association of Ukraine with either the European Union or NATO. Because so many of them have at times in the past lived under the control and domination of more western peoples like the Poles and Lithuanians, Ukrainians generally think of themselves as more western than the Russians are. They also resent the Russians for centuries of Russian rule that was always unjust and often massively violent; and they fear the possibility of Russia reasserting its control over them. Because he does not think of them as a separate people with a right to an independent existence, and because he is afraid that they will form an alliance with the European Union and join NATO, Putin feels fully justified in his attempt to eliminate Ukraine as a sovereign nation distinct from Russia.

So does Russia have a claim on Ukraine? No, it doesn’t; but it is not hard to understand why Putin and many other Russians think that it does. Ukraine was under Russian domination and control for a very long time. The Russians and the Ukrainians are very closely related linguistically and culturally. Most of both peoples are or in the past were Orthodox Christians. Their histories are closely intermeshed. Russian civilization as we (and they) know it began in Kiev, now the capital of Ukraine. That we can understand what Putin is doing in Ukraine does not make what he is doing there either legal under international law or moral under any conceivable system of true morality. It is neither. It is however important for us to understand the complex history of Russian-Ukrainian relations if we are to understand at all what is going on between those two nations today.

It's About Time

 

It’s About Time

September 29, 2022

 

Time is important to all of us. Some of us are obsessed with knowing what time it is. We set times for meetings and appointments. We remember past times in our lives, and we plan for future times. Some of us, including your humble author, get so interested in times past that we get PhDs in history. We have ways of measuring time. We use clocks and calendars to do it. They are both marked with symbols that represent time—seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years. Our languages have past, present, and future tenses that we use depending on the relationship of the subject of a sentence to time. Most of us cannot even imagine a reality that does not include time.

I’ve been thinking about time a lot recently. I’ve wondered where the past is, where it has gone. Where is the four year old me, or the twenty-four year old me, of the me of five seconds ago? They all existed once, now they don’t. Where has the nineteenth century Russia that I once spent so much time studying gone? Where is the man on whose thought I wrote my PhD dissertation? He was here on earth once, now he isn’t. It’s harder for me to ask where the future is. It doesn’t exist now, but it will. Where does it come from, or does it come from anywhere at all? Authors of science fiction stories imagine ways that we could travel through both past and future times, but of course we really can’t. The past is gone, though I don’t know where it has gone. The future has not yet come, though I don’t know where it will come from. Albert Einstein famously said that the only reason for time is so everything doesn’t happen at once. Indeed, we do not experience everything happening at once. We experience things as happening through time.

I have a PhD in studying the past, but I am also an ordained Christian minister, albeit now a retired one. I still spend some time nearly every day reading the Bible and contemplating (and often struggling with) what I find there. In recent times (there’s time again) I have been struggling with the way the Bible has the key events in its history of salvation occur over time. The Bible’s first creation story, Genesis 1:1-2:3, does not have God explicitly creating time. It does, however, have creation taking place through a progression of periods of time that it calls days. In the Bible’s second creation story, the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, things take place chronologically.

Farther on, the Bible has other major events happen over time. At a specific point in time God told Abraham to leave his home and go to far off, foreign Canaan. The Bible has the Hebrew people being enslaved in Egypt at a particular time. Then, at a particular time during their enslavement, God decides to free them from that enslavement, something God had not previously done. As the people wander through the desert on their way to Canaan, at a particular time God gives Moses the Torah law that God had not given the people before that particular time (except for the law of male circumcision, which came to Abraham much earlier in the story). The Hebrew prophets foresee death and destruction in the future, but they also foresee a time of restoration and blessing that hadn’t happened yet in the time of the prophet.

The foundational Christian story also takes place through time. Most significantly, at a particular time God decides to come to earth as the human being Jesus of Nazareth. Over the course of a few years time Jesus teaches the people God’s ways, is arrested, is crucified, dies, and rises from the grave. We Christians say that those time-specific events brought us salvation. Then, after Jesus was no longer with them physically, the earliest Christians firmest conviction was that Jesus would come again at some point in the future. All of these stories have in common that they see God’s self-revelation and divine salvation as coming to the people at particular times. They all assume that there was a time before salvation. That means that they necessarily imply that there was a time when people were not saved. Then things happened that brought a previously missing salvation.

And these days I can’t stop asking myself why? Why would there be a time when God saved the people and an earlier time when God did not? There’s no reason to think that the Hebrew people before Moses didn’t need the Torah but Hebrew people after Moses did. More importantly for us Christians, did the people who lived and died before Jesus not need salvation but people like us who lived after Jesus did? I can see no reason whatsoever for that to be the case. Will the people of some future time have more need of Christ returning in power and glory than people in the past did? Or than we do? I can see no reason whatsoever for that to be the case either. All of these scenarios assume that at some point in time God said (or will say), “Oh! I see now that the people need something that they haven’t needed before. So I’ll step in and give those people the something they need that the people before them didn’t need.” I am wrestling here with the notion of time primarily because that assumption makes no sense whatsoever.

Some of the earliest Christians came up with at least a partial solution to the problem of chronological salvation. They were concerned that the great figures of their faith tradition from the past had not been saved because they died before Jesus. That meant to them that the souls of those saints had been damned because in their time salvation had not yet come. They sensed how wrong such damnation would be, so they dreamed up a solution. They invented the doctrine of “the harrowing of hell.” They said that in the brief time between Jesus’ death and his resurrection he descended to hell and brought back up with him the souls of people of earlier times who had been damned but didn’t deserve to be. That doctrine is completely unbiblical, and it still has good people having suffered in hell for the time between their deaths and Jesus coming to bring them out of their misery. The harrowing of hell doctrine may have addressed some of the problems with chronological salvation, but it certainly didn’t solve all of them.

So what are to do with the Bible’s chronological presentation of the history of salvation? Just throw it out? Ignore it completely? Try to be Christians (or Jews) without it? Well, no. The Bible is so foundational, some of it for Judaism and all of it for Christianity, that those faiths couldn’t possibly exist without it. Yet since we Protestants don’t accept the doctrine of the harrowing of hell because it isn’t biblical, we seem to be left with no solution for the shortcomings of chronological salvation whatsoever. But are we? I’ll ask us again: Is there is a way to solve those shortcomings while still using the biblical stories of chronological salvation as foundational for our faith? Having given the matter considerable thought, I believe that there is such a way.

That way is to remove the time element from our understanding of the meanings of those stories. In other words, the solution to the problems we’re wrestling with here is to understand our foundational stories not as history but as the myths that they really are. Not myths as something people think is true that isn’t true. Myths in the far more sophisticated sense of stories that connect us with God and God with us. To understand them as stories of things that may or may not ever have happened but which are always true either way. To understand them as stories set in temporal reality that convey truths that transcend time. Truths that the stories don’t create but rather truths that always were, are, and will be true. Let me use the foundational story of my Christian faith as an example.

In that story God creates or at least demonstrates in the strongest possible way God’s salvation of the people. The story takes place over time. Jesus Christ as Emmanuel, God With Us, is born, lives a relatively short human life, dies, and rises again. That story covers the course of about thirty years. In that story we Christians find salvation, but when we leave time in the story we have only temporal salvation. Jesus happened at a specific time. There were lots and lots of people who lived before him. If the Christ story created salvation, those people weren’t saved. Because the foundational Christian story takes place over time it seems to leave us with only temporal salvation.

But what if we take time out of the story? We can’t change the story, of course, nor do we want to. We can however take time out of the meaning of the story. We can understand the story as being set in time but revealing a timeless truth. We can see the story as one that, to some extent at least, relates things that happened at a particular time but the meaning of which applies to all time. The events in the story are actually not what creates salvation. Rather, the story points us toward the truth that God is a God of salvation and not only one who always will be but one who has always been. People who lived before Jesus weren’t damned simply because they lived before Jesus (or for any other reason, but that’s a topic for another day). They were as saved as we are because God not only is but always has been a God who saves God’s people.

It may be apparent that some types of Christian theology work better with this notion of timeless salvation than others do. I’ll use soteriology, the theology of salvation, as an example. The soteriology known as theology of the cross fits timelessness well. It doesn’t say that Jesus’ suffering and death were necessary for salvation. Instead, it says that Jesus’ suffering and death demonstrate God’s unshakable presence and solidarity with us humans no matter what. It is easy to see the presence and solidarity of God with people as timeless. It has always been true, it is true, and it will always be true. Time plays no necessary role in that truth.

The far more common Christian soteriology known as the classical theory of atonement or the theory of substitutionary sacrificial atonement doesn’t work with timeless truth at all. That soteriology says that God Incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth had to suffer and die, indeed God sent Jesus to suffer and die, because a price had to be paid before God could or would forgive human sin. This theory says that because Jesus’ suffering and death are the sine quo non of salvation, there was no salvation before they took place. Yet they took place only at a specific time. A necessary conclusion of classical atonement theory is that God did not forgive the sin of people who lived before Christ’s Passion because that Passion was a condition precedent to forgiveness. (Please excuse my use of a legal concept here. I also used to be a lawyer.) When a condition precedent for some act or event is not present, that act or event of which the absent thing is a condition precedent does not happen. No Passion of the Christ, no divine forgiveness of sin. That’s classical atonement soteriology in a nutshell. It is firmly bound to an event that is said to have taken place at a specific time, and it cannot work apart from that event. The classical theory of atonement doesn’t work with timeless truth at all.

So we can indeed overcome the failings of time-bound salvation without abandoning the foundational stories of our faith. We do it by removing the time element from the story. We see the story as speaking a timeless truth rather than as merely relating historical events. Leave the time element in the story of the exodus and you have only an account of things that are said to have happened to other people a long time ago in a place far away. Remove it, and you have a powerful, timeless myth that points to God’s desire that all people be free. That is the power of timeless theology. Timeless theology frees us to see God’s truths as timeless, as indeed they must be because God transcends the created category of time absolutely. Timeless theology does nothing less than make Christian (or Jewish or Muslim) faith possible in today’s world. It is or at least can be a great blessing for us. May it be so.

Why Religion?

 

Why Religion?

September 20, 2022

 

It is of course widely known that the percentage of Americans who self-identify as Christians has been declining for decades. So has membership and attendance at Christian churches, especially but not exclusively the churches of the Protestant denominations we used to call mainline. I recently read one commentator speculating briefly on possible causes of that decline. The first one she mentioned went something like this. Societies tend to secularize as they develop. Once people’s basic needs are met, there is less reason for religion. This statement of course assumes that people have a reason, and as far as this statement is concerned, only one reason, for practicing a religious faith. That reason is that there is, or was, something missing from a person’s life. The function of religion here seems to be to make up for that which is missing. There’s an empty place in their lives, and religion fills that space for them until, and only until, something more specific, more material, comes along and fills it in a different, perhaps more obvious and immediate way.

This view of religion is essentially that of the atheists Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. They called religion “the opiate of the masses.” They meant that religious faith numbs people to the pain caused by the lack of material security and freedom from oppression they experience. Unfortunately, conventional Christianity feeds this kind of cynicism about religion. It has come, and in Marx’s and Engel’s time had come, to be about little more than a promise of a blessed afterlife that would make up for the hardships in this one. It diverts people’s attention away from the need for justice and peace in this life. If diverting people’s attention in that way is the only function of religion, then Marx and Engels are right. Faith truly is little if any more than the opiate of the people.

Yet many of us who need not worry about our basic material needs being met know that there is much more to religion than that. Religion does indeed satisfy a need in our lives. It’s just a need different from our need of the things to keep us alive. If it didn’t fill a need, there would be no religion. What is that need? To understand that need we must carefully examine just what the human condition is, for our most basic needs arise from the fundamental circumstances of that condition. So just what is the human condition? What are its fundamental circumstances, and what needs arise from them? To answer those questions we begin by looking at certain life circumstances that are true of all people, both people secure in having their basic material needs met and people who aren’t.

The list of things common to all people includes at least the following:

 

·        We are all mortal. No one gets out of this life alive.

·        We all need food, water, and air to stay alive.

·        We are all sexual in one way or another, or at least all but a tiny fraction of us are.

·        We are all vulnerable to numerous things, including disease, bodily injury, violence, and despair.

 

Foundationally, we are all finite, mortal beings. We all have certain needs in common, and we all have to make it through life as best we can until life ends. We have to keep on living until one day we don’t. None of us can escape the existential circumstances of being mortal and vulnerable.

And most foundationally, we exist suspended between being and nonbeing, between life and death, between esse and nihil, between being and nothingness. We are not gods, and we certainly aren’t God. Because we aren’t, our lives are constantly at risk. We stand as conscious beings, and most improbable ones at that. We exist on what is less than a speck of dust in a universe so vast that we can express something of its size mathematically. Beyond numbers, its size is simply incomprehensible. Our speck of the universe is not only tiny, it is wildly improbable. Change just about any aspect of it, and there is no life on it at all. Yet here we are, existing between being and nonbeing. And, most improbably, we are conscious that that is what we’re doing. We are an almost infinitesimally small part of all that is, yet we know that that is precisely what we are.

And mostly we wish it were otherwise. We know, perhaps most of us only at a subconscious level, that we are mortal and at risk of falling into nothingness. We fear that we are unavoidably bound for nothingness. We wish it were otherwise, so we resist. We imagine ourselves as being much more than we really are. We delude ourselves that we can be gods not mortals. We act as though we were our own creators rather than improbable beings created by forces, divine or material, beyond our comprehension. We hate and resent being mortal, being fallible, being vulnerable.  We experience angst over our existence being always at risk.

We know, at least at some level of our psyches, how precarious our lives are and how small we are. We have a sense of how limited our being is. Yet we can conceive of a reality that is large beyond our comprehension. The universe is that, of course, but there’s more to our conception of some transhuman reality than that. The universe itself is mortal, or so scientists believe. We conceive of a reality that Is not mortal, that subsists beyond the risk and vulnerability of being human. We imagine  such a reality, and beyond that, we feel ourselves drawn to that reality. We long for connection with it. Please understand. I don’t mean that every single person perceives this reality and feels drawn to it. Yet that perception and that sense of being drawn are universal human experiences in the sense that humanity as a whole and every culture humanity has produced has that perception and feels drawn to it. We know that because we know that every human culture that has ever existed has created some way of understanding and connecting with that other reality. We call those other ways religions. This is indeed where religion enters the picture. We call the infinite being that we experience as drawing us, and for connection with which we long and strive, God, or the Tao, or Enlightenment, or Nirvana, or the Great Spirit, or something else. Humanity is very creative in coming up with ways to speak about the transcendent reality we cannot deny, as much as so many of us today do work at denying it.

Any authentic sense of that other reality comes to us as paradox, or rather, as a whole complex of paradoxes. Transcendent reality is to us the knowable unknown, or perhaps better the knowable unknowable, the present transcendent, the impersonal person, the conditional ultimate. And though we may say that we love God, most of us hate paradox. So we create religious systems that mostly obviate paradox. Sure, Christianity is grounded in two incomprehensible but profoundly true paradoxes, namely, Trinity and Incarnation. The more sophisticated among us know, accept, and cherish ultimate paradox, but most people don’t. Such people (and that’s most people) create nonparadoxical images of God with which they find it easier to relate than it is for them to relate to the impossible but true nature of paradox. They think of Jesus not as the possible impossibility but as our brother, our friend. They see only one side of divine paradox. They call God Father and think they have God pinned down to something familiar, something we know from our human experience. When some haughty theologian, like me, tells them God is paradox they don’t understand. So they deny the truth of paradox, or, mostly, they just ignore it.

And that actually is all right. See, our sense that God is drawing us into intimate connection with God doesn’t depend on our understanding the paradoxes of God. It doesn’t really depend on us knowing anything about God at all. There is a cognitive element in our connection with God, but mostly that connection is not cognitive. It is spiritual. It functions, or at least it can function, whether we’re conscious of it functioning or not. The question about any alleged spiritual, existential truth is not whether people understand it. It is whether or not a person’s sense of God responds to their human existential needs in a positive, constructive way. Which brings us back to my original topic here, namely, the human condition.

Perhaps the most foundational thing we can say about that condition is that we mortal, vulnerable, fallible beings exist in an existential tension between being and nonbeing. The great twentieth century Protestant theologian Paul Tillich taught us to think of the ultimate as pure being. We call that pure being God. How to exist in the existential tension between God and nonbeing is perhaps the most profound question of human life. Mostly, however, we do everything we can to avoid it. Though all life is conditional, we make up meanings for ourselves that are not conditional. We ascribe great significance to the meanings we create. Yet all of those meanings are ultimately false. They are false because all human existence is conditional, and there is no way for us to make it unconditional no matter how hard we try. The ultimate meaning we can have is that we exist in existential tension. We strive for pure being and abhor nonbeing. We are all struggling to find a way to live in peace in the tension between being and nonbeing in which we find ourselves.

And here’s the bottom line: Faith in pure being, that is, in God, is the only way to find that peace. It is the only way because it is the only way that acknowledges the reality of our ultimate existential dilemma. It is the only way that doesn’t deny one side of that dilemma, one side of our ultimate existential paradox. Secularism denies the being as God side of the paradox. So does any religion that conforms too closely to the ways and understandings of secular life. The ancient Gnostics denied the physical reality side of the paradox. Some modern spiritualists do too whether they call themselves Gnostics or not. Denying either side of the paradox of existence doesn’t make the paradox go away. It only creates a view of human existence that is incomplete. That is too simplistic. That ultimately will fail precisely because it does not recognize and come to terms with the foundational reality of human existence.

Yet whether it handles the subject adequately or not, dealing with the ultimate nature of existence is the foundational purpose of religion. Dealing with the actual realities of human existence, of the human condition, in a way that is at least somewhat adequate, is what religion, in the end, is all about. That, madam commentator, is the purpose of religion properly understood. Yes, people use religion in many other ways. They use it for self-justification. They use it to prop up their worldly hatreds and prejudices. They use it to condemn people of religions other than theirs. They use it to scare people into behaving properly. But none of those uses of religion is proper. They are all bastardizations of religious faith. People do use religion as a way of bearing the burdens and pains of their lives. It gets a great many people through the night. If it does that by truly connecting people with the truly divine, it is legitimate, indeed, it is a great blessing. It is enabling life in life’s ultimate existential state. It doesn’t legitimately do that by promising people pie in the sky when they die, though that, of course, is what a lot of Christianity says it does today. When it is legitimate, it does it by connecting people with ultimate reality. With being that is not conditional, or vulnerable, or mortal. It assures them, it assures us, that being prevails over nothingness. Being has always prevailed over nothingness, and it always will. With faith we can live at peace in our most profound existential dilemma. Without faith, angst prevails over peace. Peace in our souls and peace in our world are the ultimate goals of religion. May more and more of us come to understand that profound truth.

The Scandal of the Cross

 

The Scandal of the Cross

September 13, 2022

 

Let’s face it. Jesus of Nazareth was a loser. He came to transform the world, and the Romans crucified him for it. To them he was a criminal not a savior. They treated him like the criminal they thought he was. They didn’t just execute him, they crucified him. Crucifixion was and was meant to be a horrific way to die. Mostly the Romans crucified political prisoners, and that certainly is what he was to them. They didn’t crucify him because he had an unorthodox view of Judaism. They didn’t crucify him because he had come to save souls. They didn’t crucify him as the last part of some divine plan of salvation. They couldn’t have cared less about those things. They crucified him because he proclaimed the kingdom of God. The Romans knew what kingdom was real, and it wasn’t the kingdom of God. They knew who the king was, and it wasn’t God. They crucified not because they thought he was a spiritual threat, they crucified him because they saw that he was indeed a political threat. They crucified him just like they had crucified thousands before him and would crucify thousands after him. He wasn’t special, he was an ordinary political criminal. So nail him up. Leave him there to die a miserable death. They had no moral qualms about it. They probably did it on an order from the governor or some high military official. They probably did it without a trial. Just like the many other would-be messiahs before him and after him he had gambled on world transformation and lost. In the eyes of the world, he really was nothing but a loser.

And we Christians accept and cling to this pathetic loser as our Lord and Savior! How can that be? Yes, Jesus’ crucifixion wasn’t the end of his story, but his resurrection doesn’t obviate his crucifixion. His crucifixion still happened. It is perhaps the one thing that most clearly differentiates his life from the lives of the founding figures of other great faith traditions. As far as we know, the Buddha, Moses, and Muhammad all died of natural causes. Jesus didn’t. He was executed, that is, he was legally murdered by the secular authorities of his time and place. He was a loser. His death on a cross should have been the end of him and of his movement. That’s certainly what the Romans who killed him expected his death to be.

But it wasn’t. How could that be? Yes, Jesus’ resurrection is a big part of the explanation for his death not being the end of him. Yet there is still that damned cross. I’m sure that people who heard what the Apostles said about Jesus had to wonder: Would God turn an abject failure into the savior of the world? Could a common political prisoner be the Son of God? Would God become human as a meaningless peasant from a meaningless little town in a meaningless part of the Roman Empire? To most people in the decades after Jesus’ crucifixion the obvious and undeniable answer to those questions was “No.” The cross of Christ certainly was, as St. Paul said, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to gentiles. 1 Corinthians 1:23. The cross of Christ was indeed something the earliest Christians had to come to terms with.

And come to terms with it they did. How? They proclaimed Christ crucified to be “the power of God and the wisdom of God.” 1 Corinthians 1:24. NRSV. But that really doesn’t make any sense, does it. A crucified man is utterly powerless, and wise men don’t get themselves crucified. Isn’t Christ on the cross an image of powerlessness not power? Doesn’t a man dying miserably on a cross to which the local authorities have nailed him an image of foolishness not wisdom? At first glance they sure seem to be, don’t they.

So how could Paul think that Christ on the cross is the opposite of what Christ on the cross sure appears to be? Most Christians would say it’s because in suffering and dying on the cross, Jesus, as God the Son Incarnate, was paying the price for human sin. That’s not an acceptable answer to my question for me because I reject that notion absolutely. I won’t go into why I do in depth. I’ll just say here that that theory of salvation makes God a cosmic child abuser. For more of an explanation of my rejection of what is usually called the classical theory of atonement see Chapter 8, “Beyond the Classical Theory of Atonement,” in either the original or the revised version of my book Liberating Christianity. And actually, Paul didn’t have that kind of soteriology (the theology of salvation) in mind when he wrote 1 Corinthians either. That soteriology hardly appears in the Bible at all. It wasn’t fully developed until centuries after Jesus. The monk Anselm of Canterbury did that in his book Cur Deus Homo?, published in 1107 CE. The classical theory of atonement, also called substitutionary sacrificial atonement, is not what either Jesus or Paul was about.

We come much closer to what they were about through a theology called “theology of the cross.” That name is not entirely satisfactory, for classical atonement theory is a theology of the cross too, but never mind. That’s what this other theology is called. Theology of the cross asserts, correctly, that what we see in Jesus on the cross is God entering into every aspect of human life, even the aspects of suffering and death. In Jesus’ cry of dereliction on the cross—My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?—we even see God in solidarity with us in the human experience of the absence of God, indeed, even in the experience of believing that God has abandoned us. That’s theology of the cross in a nutshell. For a fuller exposition of theology of the cross see Chapter 9, “The Meaning of the Cross, The Demonstration of God’s Solidarity,” in either version of Liberating Christianity.

OK, but how does Christ crucified become the power and wisdom of God as Paul says it does? Here’s my best explanation of how. I’ll start with the notion of the power of God. To understand how anyone or anything has power, we must begin by understanding what power is. One of the definitions of power google.com gives us is, “the capacity or ability to direct or influence the behavior of others or the course of events.” OK, but it seems to me that there is often another element in our understanding of power. When we think of someone with power we probably imagine someone or something that influences the behavior of others through force, that is, either through violence or the threat of violence. The ancient Hebrews certainly thought of the power of God that way. They believed that God sought to force them to obey God’s will through the threat of violent punishment if they didn’t. To them, both the Assyrian destruction of the northern kingdom of Israel in 722 BCE and the Babylonian conquest of the southern kingdom of Judah in 586 BCE were the result of God using or at least allowing the power of gentile empires to crush the Hebrews as punishment for their idolatry and multiple failures to do justice.

God certainly could have expressed God’s power through violence. Lord knows, enough people today want God to do so. Some people even believe that God will do that some day. That’s what the nonsense about a second coming of Christ is all about. This desire says to God, in effect, “You tried it your way with Jesus. It didn’t work. The world is still a big mess and is still full of unpunished sinners. So come back and do it our way next time. Forget this peace and love stuff. Come in power and glory and set the world right.” But here’s the thing. The ways of God are almost always (or always) the opposite of the ways of the world. That’s why the power of God looks like weakness to those who operate only from a worldly perspective.

Did Jesus on the cross influence the behavior of others? You bet he did! Jesus on the cross looks weak, but he has influenced more human behavior than any other human ever has. Of course, we humans often get the meaning of the cross wrong. Far too often (and once is far too often) we have thought that Jesus on the cross somehow authorizes us to use violence against people who, for whatever reason, don’t believe in him and even against people who do believe in him but not in the way earthly powers, including a powerful institutional church, want them to. Because we earthlings so readily see Jesus on the cross as weak, we impose our worldly concepts of power onto him and onto God. We don’t like weakness, or think we don’t. We want force. We want the bad guys eliminated through whatever method it takes. We don’t see that in Jesus, so we think he’s weak.

Still, how many people have had their behavior affected, for good or for ill, by their image of Jesus on the cross? Too many to count actually. Jesus on the cross has inspired deep faith in more people than we can even imagine. He has also caused a great many people to reject Christianity altogether because they find no redeeming virtue in the image of a man being put to a horrendous death that he didn’t deserve. They see no virtue in a man who looks so weak to worldly eyes. But God knew better. God knew that demonstrating salvation God’s way would have a power unlike any other power the world had ever seen. That, I think, is how Jesus crucified is the power of God.

Paul also says that Christ crucified is the wisdom of God. I’ll turn again to google.com for a definition of wisdom. One place Google directs us for a definition is merriam-webster.com. The various definitions of wisdom at that site all use the word “wise” as part of wisdom. That same source defines “wise” as, among other definitions, “characterized by wisdom: marked by deep understanding, keen discernment, and a capacity for sound judgment.” If that definition doesn’t fit God it fits no one! Surely God’s understanding is deeper, God’s discernment is keener, and God’s judgment is more sound than the understanding, discernment, or judgment of any mere mortal could ever be. God knows what so few of us humans do, namely, that God’s ways of love, justice for the least and the lost, peace, and nonviolence are, in the long run, more powerful than any physical force has ever been or ever could be.

Jesus on the cross shows us God’s love for us through what God gave up for us. He demonstrates God’s demand of justice for the weak and the poor by becoming one of them and showing them that neither their weakness nor their poverty can separate them from God. Jesus on the cross demonstrates God’s desire for peace on earth by demonstrating that violence is not the proper way to peace or to anything else. Violence, actually, is not God’s way to do anything. That, I think, is how Jesus on the cross is the wisdom of God.

So to the eyes of the world Jesus’ cross truly is a scandal. To the eyes of the world Jesus on the cross looks like abject failure and absolutely not like divine triumph. To the eyes of the world, Jesus is the image of impotent weakness not power. But it only looks that way because we see him only with our worldly eyes, beliefs, and expectations. The cross is a scandal because it fools people. It makes Jesus, and God for that matter, appear weak, powerless even. It makes Jesus look like a fool who went and got himself crucified when he could have avoided that fate easily enough. Yet in truth it shows exactly the opposite. It looks like weakness, it is divine strength. It looks like foolishness, it is divine wisdom. May we have eyes that see through the illusions of the world to the truth and wisdom of God.

Does Salvation Require Faith?

 

Does Salvation Require Faith?

September 9, 2022

 

We’ve all heard it, or at least all we Protestants have heard it. We aren’t saved by doing good deeds, we’re saved by “grace through faith.” That’s the technically correct to state this proposition, but often it gets reduced to just we’re saved “by faith” or perhaps “through faith.” These sayings come from the genuine letters of Paul, though he’s frightfully inconsistent about the dynamics of salvation. Yet conventional Protestantism isn’t inconsistent at all about what is required for salvation. Conventional Protestantism insists that faith in Jesus is what saves us. Perhaps the most common belief of the people who call themselves Christians is that to be saved you have to believe in Jesus. This contention is often expresses as, “You must take Jesus as your personal Lord and Savior.” Many Christians, especially conservative Protestant ones, insist that doing so is the only way to avoid your soul spending eternity in the torments of hell after you die. Believe in Jesus and you’re saved, don’t believe in Jesus an you’re not. It’s not hard to find scriptural support for this contention, especially in the Gospel of John (which is probably a big part of why conservative Christians love John so much). John 3:18, for example, reads, “Those who believe in [Jesus] are not condemned, but those who do not believe are condemned already because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God.” NRSV. So there you have it. Believe in Jesus, and you’re good with God. Don’t believe in Jesus, and your soul is in a world of trouble. That’s what Christianity is, right?

Well, no. Yes, that certainly is what Christianity has become for a great many people. There’s no denying that. Yet for many of us it is impossible to hold a faith that makes no sense, and the notion that you aren’t saved unless you believe in Jesus makes no sense at all. There are several reasons why it makes no sense, but there is one of those reasons that I want to discuss here. It makes no sense to say you must believe in Jesus to be saved because that way of looking at the matter makes salvation our doing not God’s doing. Let me explain.

In theory at least, if there is anything about Protestant Christianity that distinguishes it from other varieties of Christianity, it is that we do not earn salvation through good works. Back in 1517 an Augustinian monk named Martin Luther reached that conclusion after studying the authentic letters of Paul, especially Romans. Though Paul is inconsistent on the matter, the thrust of his theology is that salvation does not come through our doing the works of the law. Paul meant the Torah law of Judaism. Christians today usually express Paul’s idea by saying that we are not saved by any good works whether they be of the Torah or not.

So how does salvation come to us? Protestants often reduce Paul’s “by grace through faith” to “by faith.” I have always found the phrase “through faith” confusing. What does it mean? I don’t really know; but I do know what most Protestant Christians, especially conservative Protestant Christians, take it to mean. They take it to mean that we must believe in Jesus Christ if we are to be saved. They take it to mean that salvation may be through God’s grace in some abstract sense, but the only way we can actually receive God’s grace is by believing in Jesus. In this way of thinking, faith in Jesus becomes more important than God’s grace in the dynamics of salvation.

I have to ask: What’s really going on when a person says she is saved by her faith in Jesus? In this way of thinking, who is actually effecting salvation? The answer seems to clear to me. We see it in something I once read a very conservative Christian pastor say. He said that he had been saved ever since he put his trust in Jesus to get him to heaven. Shockingly, he said had done that at the ripe old age of five. Now, notice who is the primary or initial actor in this way of understanding salvation. It's not God. The individual person is the one who effects salvation. It is that act of believing that saves us, that is, we save ourselves through the work of belief. To this way of thinking, believing in Jesus becomes a work through which we are saved and without which we simply aren’t saved at all. In this way of understanding salvation, God doesn’t save us, or at least God is not the active party in the only step salvation requires. It isn’t God who decides whether a person is saved or not, it is the person himself who makes that decision. In other words, we save ourselves through our good work of faith.

I’m sorry, but though it is an understanding held by millions upon millions of Christians, that way of understanding salvation doesn’t make a lick of sense. We humans are the ones who need salvation. If we were able to save ourselves, all of us would. If we were able to save ourselves, Jesus would have nothing to do with it. But turning faith into the work necessary for salvation is a cop out. It says that the way we deal with the existential dilemma of sin and salvation is to have the right thoughts in our heads. As Marcus Borg says somewhere, it is hard to believe that God cares that much about the thoughts in our heads. Being saved through the thoughts in our heads cheapens grace. It is so easy to say we believe one thing or another. To save ourselves that way we don’t have to rely on God’s free and unmerited gift of grace, a grace that is beyond our understanding. We just have to rely on ourselves to believe the right things. We don’t have to understand God as transcendent over all human ways of doing things, we just have to project our human ways of merit and reward onto God. In this understanding, salvation is not God’s free and unmerited gift. Rather, we earn the reward of salvation through our work of proper belief. God saves us only as a reward for what we have done to earn salvation, namely believe the right things and not believe the wrong things. Faith becomes a work. The grace part of salvation by grace through faith takes a distant backseat to faith.

Yet I know that I cannot possibly earn God’s grace through any kind of faith I may have. All of us humans are finite, fallible creatures. I don’t accept the details of the hoary Christian doctrine of original sin, but I know that I am not capable of moral perfection. No one is, whether without faith or even with it. Yet we read that Jesus said, “Be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” Matthew 5:28 NRSV. The perfection of which Jesus speaks is a noble goal for us to strive to reach, but we’ll never reach it. We simply cannot earn salvation, not through any work, not even through the work of faith. We don’t save ourselves. God’s grace saves us, our faith just doesn’t.

So does faith play no role in the dynamic of salvation? Well, no, faith does have a role in that dynamic; but that role is not to save us. God’s grace saves us. God’s grace saves everyone. It always has, and it always will. Our Christian faith isn’t our salvation, it is how we Christians know that we are saved. It is how we live into a salvation that is already there through God’s infinite grace. Our faith doesn’t create that salvation, and a lack of faith doesn’t mean we aren’t saved. Christian faith is how we Christians live under God’s grace. Other people live under God’s grace through other faith traditions or even under no faith tradition at all. None of those ways of living under God’s grace creates God’s grace. God does that simply because that’s who God is. None of those ways is a prerequisite for salvation. There is no prerequisite for salvation. God gives us all salvation just because God is a God of grace not a God of works and reward. Our question isn’t are we saved. We are. Our question isn’t how do we save ourselves. We don’t. God saves us. So does salvation require faith? No, it doesn’t. Perhaps if Christianity as a whole would finally figure that out, it could continue to be the rich, vital faith tradition that is has been for nearly two thousand years. May it be so.