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Salvation:
Mapping the Salvific Themes in Christian Faith
Joe R. Jones
[This essay was written as a chapter on Salvation in collection
of theological essays by Disciples of Christ theologians for an introductory
text in theology to be published in the summer of 2007 by Chalice Press.
The essay was finished in November of 2006. Numbers in brackets refer
to notes at the end of the essays. Used here by permission. Posted here
3/27/07.]
From biblical times to the present, the discourses and practices of the
Christian church have pivoted around the central conviction that the God
of Israel, the Creator of the world, became incarnate in the life, death,
and resurrection of the Jew Jesus of Nazareth for the salvation of the
world. It is this central conviction that gave content to the joyful belief
that there was a Gospel—good news about the salvation of
the world. Drop out this conviction and this Gospel and the discourses
and practices of the church lose their coherence and continuity. But having
firmly said this, I must acknowledge that the meaning of the word ‘salvation’
has been more variegated and multidimensional than the church has often
been willing to admit.
The purpose of this chapter is to explore the various uses of salvation
language in the life of the church, identifying some differentiated uses
and their interconnection with other doctrines or teachings, and to propose
some ways of understanding how the church might understand salvation in
relation to who God is, what it means to be human and sinful, and how
the church is to witness to the salvific work of God.[1] I am hopeful
that this chapter will provide a diagnostic and constructive map of how
salvation language properly should work in the discourses and practices
of the church’s life and witness.[2]
Some Orienting Remarks and Distinctions
While the church, even in biblical times, talks much about salvation,
that word is related to other words and uses, such as deliverance, liberation/freedom,
redemption, reconciliation, atonement, sacrifice, rescue, justification,
righteousness, forgiveness, sanctification, regeneration, justice, restoration,
and healing.[3] All of these words play differentiated and interconnected
roles in the church’s discourses about salvation, or what we might
now call soteriology: how is it that persons and communities
come to be saved. And none of this could be discussed without reference
to God’s love, grace, judgment, and forgiveness.
To gain some traction on these matters, let us recall how biblical words
in Hebrew and Greek are initially rooted in ordinary language. In such
ordinary language we can discern that salvation-type words have their
meaning in relation to a presupposed contrasting condition. To be saved
is to be saved from some perilous and threatening condition and
thereby saved to or saved for some safer or more hopeful
condition. This basic contrastive character of salvation talk stays with
us even today: ‘I was saved from death by the rapid response of
the emergency room staff.’ It should be lucid to us as well how
such words as liberation and freedom have similar contrasting
conditions: to be liberated or freed is to be liberated or freed from
some oppressive or restraining condition. Notice also how deliverance
language fits neatly into salvation language: a person or a community
of persons is delivered from a perilous situation to
a safer situation. We can carry these diagnostic comments further by imagining
the contrastive conditions that make reconciliation and redemption intelligible
to us.
It will be helpful in our further discussion to keep this contrastive
character of the many types of salvation language in mind. Of course,
in ordinary language the characteristics of the contrasts are so numerous
as to defy exhaustive definition. However, in the church’s discourse
we can gain some leverage on the nature of the basic contrasts by recognizing
that they pivot around the many ways in which humans are being saved
from sin and the consequences of sin. We need, therefore, to have
some grasp of sin and its consequences in order to understand the sort
of salvation themes that are central to Christian faith. We must understand
that the relevant concept of sin is a theological concept, which means
that it cannot be articulated without identifying who God is and what
it means to be a human being living before God.
Identifying God, Human Being, and Sin
It is a basic Christian confession that God the Creator of all things
has been normatively self-revealing and self-manifesting in the election
and liberation of Israel, in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus
of Nazareth, and in the empowering work of the Holy Spirit in the summoning
of the church into life. It is this understanding of God as having an
interactive Life with the world that has entailed for the church identifying
God in triune ways: God the Creator of the world; God the incarnate Reconciler
in Jesus Christ; God the Redeeming Spirit. It is this triune God that
the church has always confessed is the Savior of human beings otherwise
lost in sin.[4]
What sort of being, then, is human being? I propose that Christian discourse’s
understanding of human being can be usefully understood in these interrelated
ways. First, human being is creaturely being, created by God as a creature
among countless other creatures. To be a creature is to be interdependent
with other finite, embodied creatures under the temporal and spatial conditions
of life: no human exists without this interdependence upon other creatures.
Further, to be a creature means that human being is not God.[5]
Second, human being is a peculiarly personal being, but intimately
formed by social interdependence with other persons. As a person, human
being is an I—a subject, a self—that can construe a world
through language and is thereby capacitated to speak to and listen to
other persons. Personal being is endowed with the gift of finite freedom
to make decisions and can encounter other persons as subjects who also
can make decisions. While no person is simply reducible to relations to
other persons and creatures, no person exists without some interdependence
with other persons and creatures.[6]
Third, human being is spiritual being, that sort of creaturely
embodied person who is made in the image of God and thereby summoned
by God to live in obedient relationship with God and in loving mutuality
with other humans, now construed as thous. It is the human spirit, as
originally endowed by grace, that can discern and hear God’s summons
into authentic community, in which mutual flourishing is possible and
the plentiful creation is the scene of joyful and peaceful begetting,
laboring, sharing, and friendship. As spiritual being, a human can grasp
her life as a gift from God and therefore as one loved by God. In short,
human spirits are created and summoned to enjoy life together in the Kingdom
of God as friends of God.[7]
While these points are only briefly noted here, they are deeply encoded
in the distinctive discourses and practices of Christian communities.
We should not suppose, however, that these concepts are the common property
of the secular discourses today that propose to tell us what it means
to be human. Christians construe human being in ways often different from—sometimes
in conflict with—the regnant theories and opinions of the secular
world.
We are now ready to identify the characteristic respects in which humans
are sinners in need of God’s salvific interaction. Sin is that absurd
corruption of God’s purposes in creating a world of creatures, of
persons, and of spirits. Sin is that disruption and disorder that penetrates
into the human individual and social life and thwarts those conditions
of fulfillment and gladness ordained by God. Sin disrupts the human relationships
to God, to other creatures and persons, and to oneself that were intended
by God in creating human being.
At the heart of human sin is unbelief—that devastating
practical refusal to believe in God in which humans rebelliously want
life on their own terms, utterly unbeholden to God. From this basic rebellion
and unbelief, Christian discourse has identified the following faces of
sin: 1) pride or hubris—that incessant self-centeredness
and selfishness in which the individual and/or the individual’s
social group are the center of all valuing of life and death; 2) concupiscence—that
disordering of desire in which the goods that can confer blessing and
peace are rejected under the urgency and compulsion of the quest for immediate
sensual satisfaction; 3) sloth—that unwillingness, that
despair about being a self accountable to God and summoned into a future
of responsibility; 4) lying—that refusal to care about
the truth and that willful telling of lies about others and oneself.
The consequences of sin—the sin that individuals enact and the sins
of others that are enacted against them— are in their multiple forms
and faces socially systemic and corruptive of human life. Humans
are incessantly stalked by their own alienation from God, their alienation
from their own created nature, and their alienation from other creatures
and especially other person-spirits. Rivalry for goods thought too scarce
to be shared provokes enmity, violence, and deadly conflicts, resulting
in much subjugation and oppression of others. Fear of death and the consequential
fear of others who might harm or kill become the dominating dispositions
and passions of human life in its individual and social forms.[8]
It is this shabby and frightful life that Christian discourse identifies
as life under sin and its consequences, which stands under the judgment
of God as that condition that is powerless to confer the goodness and
blessing the Creator intended from the beginning. This is not
how life was created to be, and it is a life, which left to its own devices,
is a living hell. God says ‘no’ to sin as that human quest
to determine on its own what creaturely powers are the real keys to life
and death and therefore are worthy of their loyalty and obedience. Idolatry
is the irrepressible urge of human life in and under the powers of sin.
What is God to do about the fact that humans live in such a way that they
deserve the alienating consequences of their lives together?
Enmity and violence, despair and fear, pain and suffering, the unrelenting
dominance of death over life, emerge as the sad tale of human life under
sin. Does the just God simply accept that the order of justice
requires these devastating consequences of human sin: a destiny of the
futile human efforts to attain peace and fulfillment? Is it simply the
case that humans either get their act together by their own free striving
and live in peace or they face endless conflict and alienation? Having
created and summoned human spirits into relationship with Godself and
fruitful fellowship with others, does God simply leave it all up to humans
to achieve whatever relief or salvation might be achieved? How, then,
shall we construe the salvific acts of God in Israel, in the life, death,
and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and in the movements of the Holy Spirit?
The Enactment of Salvation in Jesus Christ as the Incarnate Life
of God
The Bible is the primitive narrative of how the God who creates all things
acts upon and in the created world to save the world, especially humans
but not only humans, from sin and the consequences of sin.
In brief, we can identify the basic salvific acts of God—all of
which are the acts of God’s grace—as the election of and covenanting
with Israel, the incarnation of God in Jesus the Jew, and the empowering
work of the Holy Spirit in calling the church as an alternative community
witnessing to and living under the summons of God’s grace.
The primacy of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth
must be understood as the fundamental self-revelation of God’s work
of salvation. It is in Jesus that the God of Israel decisively takes up
the human peril under sin and enacts that gracious work that limits the
effects of sin and opens up a new future. Essential to Jesus’ salvific
work is that the reality of his life, crucified death, and glorious resurrection
from the dead are understood as also the work of God. Affirming that Jesus
is both human and divine means that God has become active in and vulnerable
under the conditions of the humanity of Jesus’ life. God, living
as a Jewish human being, is taking up the cause of humans living under
those conditions that are the consequences of human individual and social
sin. In affirming these claims about Jesus, we are affirming that the
Person of Jesus is both human and divine.[9]
But merely to say ‘Jesus is God incarnate’ is not yet to characterize
what he does that is salvific for humans, which the traditions have called
the Work of Jesus. Yet the Person and Work cannot be separated:
Jesus is who he is as the one who does what he does. What then does Jesus
do that is salvific? I will use a reworked understanding of the three-fold
offices of Jesus as Prophet, Priest, and Victor. In performing
all of these offices Jesus is that human being loving God and loving other
humans in the ways summoned by God in creating human life, and he is God
loving humans in those reconciling ways of forgiveness and grace.[10]
As Prophet Jesus proclaims the coming Kingdom of God as that
community of peacefulness and mutuality, not torn by enmity, jealousy,
violence, and oppressive domination of one human by another. Since it
is God who is bringing the Kingdom, Jesus does not summon folk to bring
in the Kingdom by their own earnest efforts, though he does counsel folk
about the sort of responses appropriate to the Kingdom’s imminence:
loving the enemy and the neighbor, renouncing violence, turning the other
cheek, forgiving one another, refusing that exercise of power that intends
to dominate and coerce others. Those who so respond to Jesus’ prophetic
invitation become his disciples and the vanguard of the Kingdom.
As Priest Jesus is the one who submits to the exercise of coercive
and subjugating power by those principalities that rule in human empires
perpetuating human oppression and domination. These powers claim to be
the rulers that determine life and death and under what conditions humans
are allowed to live. In the name of orderly peace and security against
enemies, these powers enslave their subjects and murder unruly enemies.
These powers murder Jesus on a brutal cross as a sign of his criminal
status—he is an enemy of and a threat to the empire’s ‘peace
and security.’
To his disciples Jesus’ crucifixion initially appears as a sure
sign that the Kingdom he proclaimed and lived is an illusory hoax brutally
cancelled by the powers of human empire. Only in their encounter with
the resurrected Jesus do the disciples come to understand that Jesus is
the Priest who lays down his life, like the sacrificial lambs of the temple,
for the sake of reconciliation. Jesus is the Christ, the divine/human
reality that takes the full brunt of the powers of sin—as they presume
to administer life and death—upon and into the divine Life itself,
thereby depriving those powers of their claim to be the determiners of
human life and destiny. The human pretence to live life in repudiation
of the summons of their Creator—to live life on their own terms—is
exposed as a lie. It is in Jesus’ resurrection from the dead that
his followers understand that he is indeed the Victor who finally
and truthfully lives without sin and has overcome the consequences of
sin, thereby ruling over life and death, over sin and the forgiveness
of sin. Jesus is the one who enacts and reveals God’s salvific grace
in overcoming God’s own alienation from the alienating lives of
sinners.
Jesus’ faithfulness, his love, his unwillingness to seize the sword
against enemies, and his forgiving of enemies as they crucified him become
that pattern of life that can repudiate sin as that way of life that is
unavoidable and necessary to human beings in their sociality. Jesus’
followers are summoned by the Spirit into a community of faith, love,
and hope, living an alternative way of life to the ways of life of the
world still bedeviled by sin—that is the summons of the Holy Spirit,
as the Spirit of Christ, to be the church as the body of Christ in and
for the world.
For Christians, then, talk of salvation will pivot around what God has
done in Jesus Christ for the salvation of a world caught up in and being
torn apart by the doing of sin and the being undone by sin. What we might
call the Way of Salvation is intimately related to the life,
death, and resurrection of Jesus and the calling of the church.
The Shadow of Dual Destiny
Before proceeding further to examine the way of salvation, we must acknowledge
what I will call a shadow that looms heavily over much of the past discourses
of the church. As we have seen earlier in our discussion, salvation-type
words always have a contrasting condition. This clearly implies that there
is a crucial conceptual distinction between being-saved and not-being-saved.
If we further assume that there must be persons who are in each category
of saved and not-saved, we seem confronted with the conclusion that there
is a dual destiny among humans: some persons are saved and some
are not-saved or are damned. Dual destiny language then forces us to inquire
about how it comes about that some persons are saved and some are damned.
Along this line of inquiry, the church invoked the language of God’s
justice wherein such justice is understood to be retributive
in character: God administers to humans what they justly deserve, whether
that be reward and blessings or punishment and rejection. This is justice
as just deserts. When these concepts structure salvation language,
it inevitably appears that those who are saved in some sense deserved
their salvation, just as those who are damned deserved their damnation.
This sort of salvation language is deeply hedged in by such concepts as
earning or winning or achieving one’s
salvation. Yet what is it that the saved do that deserves or earns their
being saved? It would appear, then, that this logic of salvation is veering
in the direction of that sort of works righteousness that Paul
and others thought denied that persons are saved by the grace of God.[11]
Not wanting to openly embrace a works righteousness understanding of salvation,
we might retrieve some sense of grace by saying that Jesus met the just
demands of God and satisfied God’s judgment against sinners.[12]
Hence, sinners no longer have to meet God’s just demands in order
to be saved. But, how then do we avoid slipping into saying that all persons
are saved by the grace of God in Jesus Christ because Jesus took the place
of sinners before God and met God’s just demands? Dual destiny thinkers,
finding that belief abhorrent and presumptuous, rush in to re-establish
dual destiny by saying that persons must do or feel or have an attitude
that accepts Jesus as one’s savior in order thereby to be saved.
It is almost impossible for this line of thinking to avoid the subtle
belief that salvation is finally up to the individual: either one accepts
Jesus as savior and thereby earns being-saved or one refuses
to accept Jesus—or just remains in ignorance of Jesus—and
therefore deserves damnation. However this view twists and turns,
the retributive justice image of God remains dominant and somehow something
persons do determines their salvation. It remains obscure, then, just
what it might mean to say one is saved by the grace of God. If grace is
a free gift, then how could one also be said to have earned the gift?
One earns rewards, not free gifts.
It is no accident that popular Christianity embraces a dual destiny view
something like this: human life in time is a trial—pivoting around
accepting Jesus as savior—that will determine whether one is saved
to a life beyond death or is damned to a life in hell.
Assuming, however, that we are committed to the dual destiny language
but want to avoid a just deserts understanding of salvation, we could,
with Augustine and Calvin, affirm that anyone who is saved is saved only
by the grace of God. Since everyone already deserves the damnation inherent
in sin, anyone actually saved from this damnation is saved only by the
gracious and inexplicable decree of God. To try to explain why this person
is saved and that person is not is impossible by appeal to any criterion
of just deserts. But this view that salvation and damnation are already
dually determined in God’s eternal predestination seems strangely
detached from any understanding of salvation being brought by Jesus Christ.
The singular virtue of this view of salvation is its firm grasp that salvation
is first and last the work of God’s grace. Perhaps the conundrum
we are facing here is rooted in the attachment to retributive justice,
just deserts, and dual destiny as the baseline concepts for understanding
salvation.[13]
On Resisting Some Recent Temptations
In the last two hundred years—a period of wrenching critiques and
disagreements within the theological discourses of churches—there
has been a tendency to focus on one aspect of salvation language at the
expense of other aspects. Hence, the rich diversity and interconnected
language of salvation gets reduced to one defining image of what salvation
really is. It will be instructive, I hope, to review briefly some of these
temptations to reduce salvation to a single defining image.
Salvation as Existential Authenticity: Claiming that the eschatological
vision of salvation as eternal life beyond death has been devastated by
modern thought, Christian faith can still identify that feature of human
existence that is determinative of the meaning of salvation, namely, the
deep existential how of a person’s life in time. Interpreting
sin as inauthentic life manifesting itself in the all-consuming fear of
death, the sinful how of a person’s life results in much
lying, self-deception, and deep despair. But in Jesus’ call to faith
and in the gracious bestowing of faith, persons come to live authentically,
accepting God’s forgiving grace as proclaimed in the gospel and
candidly facing their own deaths without resort to the myths of immortality.
Eternal life is, therefore, not some future life after death; rather it
is that state or event in some individual’s life in which authentic
response to God’s grace is realized. Salvation is to be identified
precisely in this qualitative way in which a person puts her life together.
Obviously, there is still a dual destiny, though not perhaps of just deserts:
some receive the grace and are transformed and some do not receive and
therefore are not transformed. This view of salvation is similar to all
those views that collapse the whole meaning of salvation into a primary
concern with the transformation in time of the individual’s relationship
to God. Yet this view lacks a vivid sense for the restoration of human
community and the way in which the Gospel summons persons to live in liberating
ways on behalf of their neighbors. Further, it too cavalierly repudiates
life beyond death.[14]
Salvation as Social Liberation: Largely as a critique of existential
individualism, the liberation theme emphasizes that Christian life is
the liberation of persons from social oppression to a situation of justice
and freedom. Where the powers of the world enslave persons and deprive
them of their just share of society’s goods, there is no justice
and therefore no liberation and no meaningful sense of salvation. Liberation
thinkers have helpfully discerned the many ways in which sin is a socially
systemic problem and that political/economic realities must be engaged
if there is to be actual social salvation for the oppressed. While this
is a word that is needed by the church, it does seem to imply, when it
is understood as the only or primary meaning of salvation, that the socially
oppressed are simply in all respects determined by their oppression and
therefore lacking any meaningful sense of salvation. This also implies
that the oppressed of the past—who never knew liberation from social
oppression—have somehow missed the saving work of God in the world.
As a necessary theme in Christian faith, liberation from social oppression
is uneliminable; yet, as the primary or defining theme of salvation, it
is devastating to our understanding of the limits of God’s salvation.
It needs an appreciation of how Paul in jail and a host of oppressed Christians
of the past felt also liberated by God’s grace with a hope in God
that transcends any particular conditions of human life in time.[15]
Millennial Salvation: This theme emerges out of the Book of Revelation
[20.4–6] in which a thousand-year reign of Christ seems to be prophesied.
While that notion itself seemed misleading to many in the first centuries
of the church’s life and even threatened the final inclusion of
Revelation in the New Testament canon, it does reappear time and again
in the life of the church. The central point of the millennial theme is
that there will be a thousand-year reign of Jesus in human history.
It is a vision of peace and well-being actually being lived out by humanity
under the gracious reign of Jesus. Pre-millennialists believe that Christ
will return and usher in the reign of peace, at the end of which the final
judgment of all things will be rendered. Post-millennialists believe Christ
will come at the end of the thousand years and judge all things. We should
appreciate the emphasis of the millennialists on the concreteness of the
kingdom in history, which is similar to the liberationists concern for
tangible social justice. However, two perils lurk in millennialism: 1)
it can devolve into emphasizing that the Christians must themselves bring
in the kingdom by their righteous efforts or at least their righteous
efforts will be the precondition for Jesus bringing in the kingdom; or
2) the beginning or the ending of the millennium becomes bathed in violence,
either the violence of slaughtering the evildoers in order to bring in
the kingdom or the violence of slaughtering at the end. This violence
language seems inevitable when this vision of salvation rests primarily
on the Book of Revelation, which is replete with violent language about
the conflict between good and evil.[16]
All of these views, in their tendency to insist that the center of the
church’s understanding of salvation is defined by their particular
emphasis, can mislead the church about the differentiated and interconnected
range of meanings available in a full-orbed understanding of the salvific
work of the triune God. The following section will propose a map of salvation
issues and concerns that comprehensively fit together without obvious
self-contradiction.
The Spheres of the Way of Salvation: A Proposal
In the gospels’ narratives, Jesus is confronted by a rich young
man who asks: “Good Teacher, what good deed must I do to inherit
eternal life?” After the young man avers that he has kept “the
commandments,” Jesus summons him to sell his “possessions,
and give the money to the poor…and come, follow me” to which
the man goes away “grieving, for he had many possessions.”
The puzzled disciples ask: “Then who can be saved?” to which
Jesus replies: “For mortals it is impossible, but for God all things
are possible.” [see Mt 19.16-20; Mk 10.13-16; Lk 18.18-30]
In great proximity to this text, it is often asked; ‘what must I
do to be saved?’ The accent is on what must be done in
order to gain salvation, here understood as ‘eternal life.’
This picture of salvation and the earning-of-salvation has exercised a
tight grip on much Christian imagination for centuries. That same picture,
of course, ignores the further words of Jesus: “For mortals it [viz.
inheriting eternal life] is impossible, but for God all things are possible.”
Salvation, inheriting eternal life, is impossible for mortals by the powers
of their own actions? Many are the issues lurking in this passage, which
we will now try to unfold.
To make sense out of this passage and to overcome some of the unsatisfying
lacunae in the just deserts/dual destiny language, I propose to differentiate
the language of salvation among the following spheres of salvation issues,
while still grasping the deep interconnections of the theme of the triune
God’s gracious salvation in Jesus Christ and the summoning of the
church through the Spirit. It is through the language and realities of
the spheres that we will be able to appreciate the complex and differentiated
ways in which the church can talk about salvation.
The first sphere, in the language of incarnation,
atonement, reconciliation, and justification, emphasizes what was
done—what was achieved—in the life, death, and resurrection
of Jesus Christ. Something happened in this particular human’s historical
career —what he did and what was done to him—that has a sovereign
reality not simply dependent on the response of believers or followers.
Indeed, who Jesus was and what he did—as have been identified in
our previous discussion—are the fundaments of whatever else the
church might say about God, human life, and salvation.[17]
However, this sphere can fall into disarray if we do not hold together
and appreciate the interpenetration of Jesus’ work as Prophet, Priest,
and Victor. He is the Prophet of the Kingdom that is crucified on the
cross and raised as the Victor over life and death. He is the vulnerable
Priest who proclaims a Kingdom of peace and nonviolence and was murdered
by the principalities and powers—imperial political and religious
leaders—that murder in order to dominate and subjugate. He is the
Victor raised from the dead who is the presence of and the forerunner
of a Kingdom of peace. In all these offices, Jesus is the incarnate life
of God graciously taking the sins of the world upon and into the divine
Life and thus disarming them of their power to determine human meaning
and destiny before God.
So, who is saved in this sphere? All humans are saved from the condition
of being condemned by their sins before God to the condition of being
graciously forgiven and justified in ways beyond their deserts. This gracious
forgiveness stands there just on its own, independent of its acceptance
and appropriation by any person, though its acceptance and appropriation
bring the forgiveness and justification home to the believers.
The second sphere of salvation language pertains to the
actual ways in which persons subject to sin find their lives forgiven,
graced, healed, and transformed by the Spirit of Christ. The centering
focus of this transformation is how persons appropriate in their
lives and communities what Jesus revealed and accomplished for
them. This is the sphere in which life in the church and the discipleship
to Jesus become decisive themes. This sphere we will call historic
redemption as what is taking place in what I will also call historic
destiny: how life unfolds in the spatiality and temporality of human
history. The special role of the church in historic redemption is that
it is the body of Christ in the world and the bearer of the means
of grace—embodied in its distinctive discourses and practices—by
way of which persons come to know and appropriate the grace of God revealed
and enacted in Jesus Christ. Distinctive Christian life becomes an ethics
of grace: given what God has done in Jesus Christ, Christians live
under the summons to be peacemakers and forgivers, lovers of neighbors,
strangers, and enemies. This is not an ethics of how to earn God’s
grace but an ethics of how to live in conformity to grace freely given
and freedom conferring. Indeed, being liberated from the destiny determining
power of sin, Christians can live for others without fear of death or
the threat of death.
Hence, in its distinctive discourses and practices the church bears a
witness to the gracious salvific acts of the triune God, intending in
every way to be a alternative community of faith, love, and hope living
for the benefit of the world otherwise entangled in sin. The church’s
life unfolds amidst the dynamic interaction of its nurturing practices—worship,
communal care, and educational formation in faith—and in its outreach
practices—evangelism, prophetic critique of the worldly powers
of domination and oppression, and the actual engagement in works of love
on behalf of the world. It is in these outreach practices that the church
enacts a liberating dismantling of the many individual and social forms
of sin in the world. It should be apparent that all of these works
of the church in historic redemption are from beginning to end salvific
in character and purpose.[18]
Having now affirmed this work of God in historic destiny, we must also
admit that many are the individuals and the socio/political arrangements
and communities that never respond to the work of forgiveness in Jesus
and the work of transformation in the Spirit. In some sense, then, we
must admit that in historic destiny, some folk know no healing and loving
God of grace. If historic destiny is the complete scope of human
life before God, we would have to admit that many are they who die in
time having lived lives ravaged by sin—their own sin and the sins
of others against them—without any apparent experience of God’s
salvific grace. Because the church believes that Jesus was raised from
the dead and reigns as Victor over life and death, it also believes that
historic destiny is neither the full scope of life nor the final determiner
of life before God.
The third sphere of salvation language pertains to how
we identify issues of ultimate human destiny. To ask about ultimate
human destiny is to ask about the ultimate end of human life, meaning
both end as telos or goal and end as finis or finality
and conclusion. In discussing these issues we are entering upon the doctrinal
theme of eschatology: what is God’s ultimate determination
of the meaning, reality, and scope of human life, indeed of the life of
the whole cosmos. Is death simply what is final about human life, and
now death under the shadow of sin? Or are there transhistorical
possibilities and realities? In traditional language, notions of heaven
and hell emerge in this sphere.
The center of ultimate destiny language is the reality of the triune God:
Creator, Reconciler, and Redeemer. We have affirmed that much pivots around
what God did in Jesus Christ and its benefits for humanity. Not
only does the incarnational narrative of Jesus’ work include the
cross as manifesting the vulnerable power of the divine Life in taking
the destined consequences of sin upon and into God’s Life and thereby
depriving them of their power to be the determiners of human destiny,
but the resurrection of Jesus is the gracious opening up of life beyond
death. But for whom is this life beyond death—what I am calling
transhistorical life—made possible? Only for those who
have faithfully followed Jesus and thereby earned the right to
dwell eternally in God’s grace? Were this the logic of life beyond
death, then only the faithful will be ultimately redeemed and the unfaithful
will be absent, either in absolute annihilation in death or in being raised
to an everlasting life in hell! Is it possible that the crucified Jesus
descended into hell—as that stark and devastating extremity of human
alienation from God—and thereby emptied hell as the ultimate destiny
of any human being?[19]
I am proposing that the Life of the triune God with the world is from
beginning to end—as the Alpha and Omega of life and being—the
life of a gracious Creator in search of the redemption of rebellious creatures
and therefore precisely as Omega has, is, and will be the Ultimate
Companion and Redeemer of all creatures. Hence, rather than being
saved by their merits or condemned by their demerits, in this sphere of
ultimate destiny, all will finally be saved by the grace of God. Being
raised to life beyond death is a gift of God and is neither a natural
attribute of being human nor an earned reward for righteous life. Christians
above all, not only know the grace of God, they also are keenly aware
of the repetitious ways in which sin clings to their own acts and feelings.
This awareness thus disabuses Christians of trusting that the presumed
stalwartness and extent of their faithfulness could earn them such eternal
life. Christians are those who deeply and passionately encounter death—their
own and the deaths of the many others—as a dying unto the sheer
gracious love of God. Bluntly, Christians trust and hope in the grace
of God, not in their own presumed achieved righteousness! When all things
are subjected to the work of Jesus Christ, they will be subjected by the
transforming power of the triune God who incarnately and ultimately refuses
to count the sins of the world against it and who graciously redeems all
creatures. Joyfully, God’s power and grace are the final and ultimate
determiners of the meaning and destiny of human life. God speaks and enacts
an unceasing triumphant yes to the world.
Yet God’s ultimate redemption is not only the destiny of human life;
it is also the destiny of the whole creation, including all creaturely
beings and powers. Affirming that the created world as created is finite
with a beginning—which is the beginning of time and temporality—the
world also has an end, both as goal and conclusion. At some point in the
future, God will consummate the whole creation as a redemptive kingdom
in which nothing good is lost and all creatures cease conflict and rest
in peace. It is the ultimate yes of God that subverts every doctrine that
claims God will ultimately destroy the world in a final act of
violence.
The church must never forget nor neglect the belief that the triune God,
who lives in freedom and love, is the Alpha and the Omega—the beginning
and the end—of all creatures and all principalities and powers.
Endnotes
[1] It will not have escaped the reader’s notice that I do not think
the topic of ‘salvation’ can be explored without discussing,
at least and minimally, the doctrines of God, humanity, sin, christology,
ecclesiology, and eschatology, topics also discussed in other chapters
of this book. Perhaps it might be interesting to discern ways in which
there is agreement and disagreement among the various authors of the essays
in this book.
[2] Most of the issues discussed in this essay have been more extensively
discussed in my two-volume systematic theology, A Grammar of Christian
Faith: Systematic Explorations in Christian Life and Doctrine (Lanham,
MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002), hereinafter referred to as GCF, and
in a collection of my writings published as On Being the Church of
Jesus Christ in Tumultuous Times (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2005),
hereinafter referred to as BCJC. An earlier essay, “Schematic Reflections
on Salvation in Jesus Christ,” explored many of the themes and issues
in this chapter and is reprinted in BCJC, pp. 104-22.
[3] Useful studies of many of these biblical words can be found in: Interpreter’s
Dictionary of the Bible, 4 vols., ed. George Arthur Buttrick (Nashville,
TN: Abingdon, 1962); Theological Dictionary of the New Testament,
abridged edition, ed. Gerhard Kittel and Gerhard Friedrichs, edited
and translated by Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1985);
The Anchor Bible Dictionary, 6 vols., ed. David Noel Freeman
(New York: Doubleday, 1992).
[4] See GCF, chapter 4, pp. 149-232, for a fuller discussion of the doctrine
of Trinity.
[5] See GCF, chapter 6, pp. 293-364, for a fuller discussion of Human
Being as Created and Sinful. See esp. pp. 296-99 on creaturely being.
[6] See GCF, pp. 300-22 on personal being.
[7] See GCF, pp. 322-36 on spiritual being.
[8] See GCF, pp. 343-64 on sin. Søren Kierkegaard and Reinhold
Niebuhr are the great diagnosticians of sin in the modern world. See Søren
Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death, ed. and trans. Howard V.
Hong and Edna H. Hong, Kierkegaard’s Writings, vol. 19
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980); and Reinhold Niebuhr,
The Nature and Destiny of Man: A Christian Interpretation (New
York: Scribner, 1949).
[9] See GCF, chapter 7 on The Person of Jesus Christ.
[10] See GCF, chapter 8 on The Work of Jesus Christ.
[11] See Gal 2.15-21 for Paul’s incisive discussion of the issue
of works righteousness under the law. See also GCF, pp. 513-19.
[12] St. Anselm undertook to explain the salvific work of Jesus along
these lines in “Why God Became Man,” in A Scholastic Miscellany:
Anselm to Ockam, ed. and trans. Eugene R. Fairweather, Library
of Christian Classics, vol. 10 (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1956),
pp. 100–183. See GCF, pp. 443-45, 453-54 for a critique of Anselm.
[13] See GCF, pp. 709-24 for an extended discussion of issues involved
in affirming dual destiny.
[14] Rudolf Bultmann dominated discussions about salvation during the
1950’s and 60’s. See his New Testament and Mythology and
Other Basic Writings, ed. and trans. Schubert Ogden (Philadelphia:
Fortress, 1984).
[15] Liberation theology is more variegated than this brief excursus suggests,
ranging from Latin American liberation theologians, to African-American
theologies, to feminist theologies. The common theme of all these theologies
is that liberation from oppression is some state of affairs in human history
in which justice is achieved and oppression is dismantled in all its forms.
The concept of justice that functions as the goal of liberating and emancipating
work often seems unstable and imprecise. See the sympathetic but sobering
critique of Latin American liberation theology by Daniel M. Bell, Jr.,
Liberation Theology After the End of History: The Refusal to Cease
Suffering (New York: Routledge, 2001). See also GCF, pp. 505, 528-36.
630-33, 699-709.
[16] It is one of the strange silences among descendents of the nineteenth
century Stone-Campbell Movement, that it has forgotten that Alexander
Campbell, one of the pioneering movers, understood himself as a millennialist
and for years he published the journal entitled Millennial Harbinger.
Campbell did seem to believe that the restoration of New Testament Christianity
that he was advocating was beginning to show signs of progress that suggested
that the reign of Christ might be near historically. However, Campbell’s
millennialism completely lacked the emphasis on a violent return by Christ
to destroy the evildoers, which seems so prominent in today’s world.
But the terrible conflict of the Civil War devastated Campbell’s
confidence that the movement of ‘restoration Christianity’
and the providential ordering of American democracy were harbingers of
an almost ‘imminent’ kingdom of God. See the fine discussion
of Campbell’s millennial concerns in Robert Frederick West’s
Alexander Campbell and Natural Religion (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1948), esp. pp. 163–222.
[17] See GCF, pp. 433-35, 473-80 for discussions of the benefits of Christ
and human salvation.
[18] For a more complete discussion of the church and salvation see BCJC,
chapter 4, “The Church as Ark of Salvation.” While I would
not recommend a theological perspective that would reduce the role of
the church in salvation to being one among many instances of religious
communities conveying salvation, it must be admitted that the work of
the Spirit of Christ is not restricted to the church. How and where it
might be at work is a profound theological question. See GCF, 497-501.
[19] On the status of hell, see: Joe R. Jones, "Hell is Empty."
DisciplesWorld, vol. 3, issue 9 (November 2004), pp. 13-15.
Further Readings
Aulén, Gustaf. Christus Victor. Translated by A. G. Hebert.
London: S.P.C.K., 1953.
Balthasar, Hans Urs von. Dare We Hope: “That All Might Be Saved”?
Translated by David Kipp and Lothar Krauth. San Francisco: Ignatius
Press, 1988.
Barth, Karl. Dogmatics in Outline. Translated by G. T. Thompson.
London: SCM Press, 1949.
Ellacuria, Ignacio and Jon Sobrino, eds. Mysterium Liberationis: Fundamental
Concepts of Liberation Theology. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1993.
Ford, David F. Self and Salvation: Being Transformed. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1999.
Jones, Serene. Feminist Theory and Christian Theology: Cartographies
of Grace. Minneapolis: Fortress, 2000.
MacDonald, Gregory. The Evangelical Universalist. Eugene, OR:
Cascade Books, 2006.
McIntyre, John. The Shape of Soteriology Studies in the Doctrine of
the Death of Christ. Edinburgh: T. & .T Clark, 1992.
Moltmann, Jürgen. The Coming of God: Christian Eschatology.
Translated by Margaret Kohl. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996.
Parry, Robin A. and Christopher H. Partridge, eds. Universal Salvation?
The Current Debate. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003.
Polkinghorne, John and Michael Welker, eds. The End of the World and
the Ends of God Science and Theology on Eschatology. Harrisburg,
PA: Trinity, 2000.
Ruether, Rosemary Radford. Women and Redemption: A Theological History.
Minneapolis: Fortress, 1998.
Suchocki, Marjorie Hewitt. The Fall to Violence: Original Sin in Relational
Theology. New York: Continuum, 1995.
Wink, Walter. The Powers That Be: Theology for a New Millennium.
New York: Doubleday, 1998.
Yoder, John Howard. The Politics of Jesus. 2nd ed. Grand Rapids,
MI: Eerdmans, 1994.
Study Questions
1. Before reading this chapter, how would you describe your own understanding
of salvation as an essential Christian theme? In what ways did this chapter
challenge or confirm your view?
2. When Jones refers to ‘differentiated and interconnected’
meanings of the word ‘salvation,’ what is he bringing to our
attention? Is this helpful? Discuss.
3. How does the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ bear on
salvation themes and concerns? Explain. Is it important that Jesus be
thought of as divine? Why? Why not?
4. How would you explain the concept of dual destiny? Is it helpful to
think of salvation in these terms? Why? Why not? How does this concept
depend on a notion of divine justice? Explain and discuss that concept
of justice.
5. Write a short essay explaining and critiquing this affirmation: ‘Universal
ultimate salvation is at the heart of the Christian understanding of God
and human destiny.’
Copyright©Joe R. Jones
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