SAVED FROM WHAT?
I’ve been thinking lately about salvation. “Salvation” is an odd sort of word. We rarely use it outside the church. Certainly, in a setting like this—a blog entitled The Peripatetic Pastor—you would expect any discussion of salvation to be biblical and theological, something perhaps in answer to the question: What must I do to be saved? I will not disappoint you in that regard. I will have theological things to say. But, as with theology in general, it’s important to tie salvation to life, to real world experience. Otherwise, our theologies float in the air like untethered balloons, disconnected from what we see and know. So rather than beginning with theology, let’s begin with a question that may tie salvation down to earth: Saved from what? What do we, you and I, need to be saved from?
Our first answer might be the simplest: we need to be saved from the perils of life: disease, injury, threats of violence, losses of any kind. It may interest you that the biblical words for salvation cover these sorts of perils. Greek sōzō and its derivatives can mean “to make or become well.” The woman who touches the hem of Jesus’s garment says to herself, “If I only touch his cloak, I will be made well” (sōthēsomai; Matthew 9:21). Literally, “I will be saved.” The Old Testament words for salvation, including yšʿ from which comes the name Joshua (Greek, Jesus), mostly refer to these perils: rescue from enemies, disease, immanent death, even loss of reputation. What counts as salvation in the Bible is often a this-worldly enterprise.
But these immediate perils do not by themselves answer the question with which we began: From what do we need to be saved? There are other perils, still this worldly, but of a different sort. Consider three broad categories—estrangement, judgment, and moral enslavement—with no pretense that with these three I’ve the field. These are also biblical. When the Bible speaks of salvation, it is often speaking of these things.
ESTRANGEMENT
Take estrangement. By estrangement I have in mind a broad range of broken relationships. What comes first to mind are broken relationships with other people. I’ve recently read Elizabeth Strout’s latest novel, The Things We Never Say. It’s a fine exploration of how what we don’t say to each other becomes the tissue of estrangement. Everyone in the novel harbors secrets, and these secrets come between people. But then this is the subject of many novels lately. Try Douglas Stuart’s John of John or Kiran Desai’s The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny or, from a few years ago, Sally Rooney’s Normal People. How can we be saved from the deep loneliness that envelopes us?
And it’s not just other people from whom we are estranged but from the world around us. The deep estrangement of humans from the natural world makes an appearance already with the Epic of Gilgamesh, our first literature. Originating at the very beginning of the 2nd millennium BCE, it gives voice to the sense that we both belong and don’t belong to the world of nature. There’s a leftover bit of this anxiety in the story of Adam naming the animals in Genesis 2: “But for the human there was not found an equal partner” (2:20). Adam is lonely.
And this estrangement from the natural world extends to the divine world. Not only are we not fully at home on earth; we are also not at home in heaven, a theme also found broadly in ancient literature. We are not gods. As Ecclesiastes has it, we aspire to eternity but we belong to the dust (3:9-11).
JUDGMENT
We could build out this theme from here, all the many ways that estrangement enters our lives. Add to that our second broad category, judgment. If estrangement describes broken relationships, judgment places our lives against the standards we use to measure our lives. Have we done right? Have we done anything consequential with our lives, anything that will last? Have our lives mattered? Or have we in the deepest sense failed? Again, this is a theme that we could build out, how judgment enters our lives. And again this theme is biblical.
MORAL ENSLAVEMENT
Add to these perils a third, what I’ve inelegantly called moral enslavement. Moral enslavement is the way we find ourselves entrapped, unable to do the good we fully believe we should be doing. The classic statement for moral enslavement is the one given by the Apostle Paul in Romans 6 and 7:
For . . . I am of the flesh, sold into slavery under sin. I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate . . . . For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. (7:14-15, 19)
The paradigm example for moral enslavement is of human-caused climate change. We daily contribute to the problem, each of us who live First World lives. The concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere ticks up steadily with deleterious consequences for other species and for other people living in vulnerable parts of the world. And so we recycle, do what we can, but it’s not enough. The evil we do not want is what we do.
BIBLICAL SALVATION
Estrangement, judgment, and moral enslavement—a formidable set of challenges for human life. But here’s the thing: all of these real world perils are addressed in the Bible under the idea of salvation. For estangement, the key word in the Bible is “reconciliation.” For judgment, the key word is “vindication,” often translated “justification.” And for moral enslavement, the word is “redemption,” buying a person out of slavery. All of these words are extended metaphors, addressing the multiple ways in which we need to be saved. The Bible has other metaphors, but reconciliation, vindication, and redemption are three of the most important. (For a convenient list of the many Pauline metaphors for salvation, see James D. G. Dunn, The Theology of Paul the Apostle, 328-334.)
To this point, I’ve been talking about salvation mostly in individual terms, which is how salvation is usually addressed in the church. What must we do to be saved gets pared down to what must I do to be saved. But salvation in the Bible is addressed not just to us as individuals but to all of us together, to our essential humanity. Our estrangement from each other, nature, and God is at the heart of such real world problems as war, street violence, environmental damage, global warming, and religion. Biblical reconciliation seeks to address all of these and more. Judgment addresses our culpable failure collectively. We have sown the seeds of our own destruction. The biblical wrath coming for us is wrath we have brought on ourselves. And moral enslavement describes the way that we are together trapped in systems that drag us into evil. We still, in the 21st century CE, get ourselves caught in intractable conflicts among nations and neighborhoods and families. In our standard theologies—I’ll have more to say about this below—we abstract sin from the evil around us. And in doing so, we remove salvation from the world in which we live.
The breadth of these biblical metaphors challenges our view of salvation. If salvation is something that happens only after death in a world outside the world in which we live, it’s easy to talk about it. One can do that kind of theology without measuring it against human progress or the lack of it. A preacher can stand in the front of church and declare that all anyone has to do to be saved is come forward and pray a short prayer. Easy enough to do. But if salvation is to overcome estrangement in all its dimensions, then it’s harder to speak casually about it. How does reconciliation play itself out? And how concretely are we to find our way to vindication? And, hardest of all, how are we to escape the systemic traps in which we are caught? If our faith is to make sense, it needs to make sense on earth.
DISTANCING SALVATION FROM THE REAL WORLD
I have left until now the standard salvation narrative in the theology that many of us grew up with. In that narrative, what we need to be saved from is punishment, everlasting punishment. This narrative proposes—on the basis, it should be said, of a dubious reading of the Bible—that we have incurred guilt through the sin of Adam. This guilt requires God to punish us eternally (and ever so cruelly) in hell. But Jesus took upon himself our guilt, and consequently, if we confess Jesus (the little prayer I mentioned above), we are declared righteous before God, vindicated, and we will instead live eternally in heavenly bliss.
This narrative distances salvation from the world in which we live in both directions. First, in the direction of evil, it distances our guilt from life. The estrangement, condemnation, and moral enslavement that we daily and collectively experience—the whole mess of our lives—matters only as a consequence of the one sin that counts: Adam’s sin. As it plays out in this narrative, the doctrine of total depravity serves mostly to let us off the hook. After all, what can we do? We are fallen creatures in a fallen world. In this theology, evil is abstracted. We don’t have to think about it in real terms: how does evil work? How does our faith address estrangement? How can we find vindication? How can we escape the moral traps into which we have fallen? How many books of theology address those questions?
And if the narrative distances us from real world evil, it also distances us from real world salvation. And this has consequences not only for theology but for the practice of the faith. Salvation in the standard view is not participatory. It’s declarative. It’s not anthropological, what we do as humans; it’s divine. Salvation is what God declares. In his handbook on systematic theology, Louis Berkhof says:
The matter [salvation] should be studied theologically rather than anthropologically. The work of God rather than the work of man is definitely in the foreground. (Systematic Theology, 348)
SALVATION IN PAUL
In Berkhof’s Reformed theology, humans do nothing except believe. We are saved by faith, not works. We have been taught this for so long that it sounds like biblical truth. But it isn’t. What the Apostle Paul counsels the Philippians is not an isolated thought: “With fear and trembling work out your salvation” (2:12). At the core of Paul’s theology is his claim that in the death of Christ humanity has come to a turning point. This turning point presents us with two opposing but overlapping practices: that of the original human race under the dominion of death and that of a new human race under the dominion of life (on this see especially Romans 5). To learn the practice of Jesus is to learn a new way to be in the world that overcomes estrangement, a way vindicated by God in resurrection, a way that promises escape from the slaveries in which we find ourselves.
That’s only the briefest sketch. This faith requires an uncommon sort of imagination. Through the practice of it we are, collectively and individually, transformed. As Paul has it, winding up his argument in Romans:
Do not be conformed to this age, but be transformed by the renewing of the mind, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect. (12:2)
SALVATION PRACTICE
This is Paul. Similar readings can be made for the theologies of John and Peter and the book of Hebrews, each using a somewhat different theological language. In each salvation is worked out as a way of being in the world, a participation in the new humanity initiated in Christ.
We remain far from this salvation even as we embrace it, as we seek to learn it. It’s discouraging to ask what difference the long history of the church has made in the world. The answer seems sometimes to be: not much. Or worse.
Salvation is not for the faint of heart. We remain estranged, condemned, and enslaved, but in this faith we touch the tender promise of reconciliation, vindication, and redemption. And touching these possibilities, the grim daily headlines die away for a moment, and our salvation appears in front of us.
What’s important is that we keep salvation in front of us. Salvation is a path, a practice, a way. For we who are Christians, the Jesus way. The narrow way. Salvation is not something that can be readily packaged into a theological narrative, a set of theological propositions. We learn it by living it.
Clay