A Question asked on one of the Pastoral Platforms i enjoy—
True or false?
"What if salvation is a lifelong journey toward maturity, love, and wholeness? If this is true, Jesus would not be our savior by his sacrifice, but the one who exemplified maturity, love, and wholeness. Then Jesus’ life is what is important, not his death. He showed us how to live fully human and, if we follow his example, we can become fully human, too."
- Ed Taylor
Responses varied from:
1) Absolutely false, as Jesus death and resurrection is what is crucial in terms of securing our forgivenes, our reconciled relationship with God and a new resurrected power to be like Jesus.
2) True, but incomplete, needing the reconciliation and empowering of the cross and resurrection.
My response:
Of-course salvation is a life long (at least) journey toward maturity, love and wholeness. It can never be less than that or we will have turned heaven or a restored earth into hell.
It also follows that, “if we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son while we were still enemies, now that we have been reconciled, how much more certain is it that we will be saved by his life?” (Romans 5:10 CEB). Thus, it follows that “if we follow his example, we can be fully human.”
It does not follow that that is the full definition of salvation. I would suggest only that it cannot be less than that but is a great deal more than that.
Further, that salvation still includes the kingdoms of this world becoming the kingdom of our Lord and heaven and earth becoming united in purpose and spirit, at least.
Jesus death remains central as an atoning reality in at least three senses:
1) In his death Jesus confronts the evil (the empire) and offers forgiveness as both the reality of the Kingdom now fully born in the earth and a foretaste of our living such a kingdom out in each human life and generation. As long as evil lives it will require a “sacrificial” response to overcome it.
2) Jesus cross and his life is the Trinity of God at great cost living reconciled to humanity and death is overcome by life. (Romans 5..as in Adam all die, so in Christ all live).
3) If we are to grow up into Christ (and there is no salvation apart from that journey in life and/or beyond) we will become fully human. To that end Jesus birth, life, passion, death and resurrection and Jesus continuing Prayers is the costly, active work of the Trinity, in us—atonement. Hence, it’s not simply “following an example” as if it were a matter of education only. It is instead a “living into a conditioned relationship via an eternal and unconditional love poured out.
Conversely, hell is simply turning away from such a sacrificing life and love and increasingly becoming de-humanized, unrecognizable.
Two sides of a coin
The writer (Ed Taylor) is affirming the reality that God in Jesus of Nazareth redeems humans, not sin—in the strictest sense. Hence Paul’s purpose given the church for some to be apostles, some teachers, etc. “until we all reach the unity of faith and knowledge of God’s Son. God’s goal is for us to become mature adults—to be fully grown, measured by the standard of the fullness of Christ” (Ephesians 4:13 CEB). The standard is that we grow up into Christ. John the beloved indicates that we don’t know as yet all that we shall be but we know with certainty that we shall be like him for we shall see him as he is (I John 3:4-5).
Part of the essence of salvation is being fully human or restored to the image of God, now wounded.
To be sure, one of the things necessary is that we will die with Christ on a cross of suffering and that may include death to false egoism, loves—anything or anyone that mars God’s place in our life in making us fully human or like Christ.
That descriptive of “dying to the self” is the negative side of the coin which is made complete in giving ourselves away in love to others needs. This positive love is the whole purpose of creation and a humanism based upon the image of God. Restoring our humanity is the ideal of which we should never fear—just because there may be counterfeit or even other examples of it in which Christ is the hidden One underneath in Prevenient grace—or the Presence of God’s love poured out upon every human wether they are conscious of it or have even heard of Jesus. Wherever sacrificial love is, Jesus is!
The Exchanged Life
To go back to the beautiful quote you made of Paul. Remember he said, “I live, yet not I, but Christ in me.” Paul is not displacing the human self but rejoicing in our/his restoration in and through Christ. It is all in Christ, wherever, whenever a life is poured out for another—no matter the place, time (before or after Jesus of Nazareth) or any faith tradition. That is precisely the glory of God in Christ, he (Jesus of Nazareth—fully human and fully God) fills the heavens and the earth. (Eph 3 10-12). It is an exchange; our wounded broken marred expression of the image of God for our glory filled, redeemed, suffering love given us in Christ and poured out in us by The Spirit through the Church (Rom 8:16-32).
So, I see nothing in the author’s statement that compromises that though it doesn’t go far enough. I see nothing in previous responses about our dying to Adam’s wounded ego-centric selfishness, but it is not the whole or even larger point of it.
God becoming Flesh is far more than an attempt to Communicate
It is actually the incarnation of God becoming human that is at center, not in contrast to either Jesus death or resurrection, but as the premise from which both the cleansing and healing of our wounded Adamic human nature (in the cross) and the restoration of our mature complete humanity emerge.
The problem with starting with either the cross or resurrection is that it alters the gospel by separating it from its Biblical roots or narrative.
The Written Word, in the memory of the People of God (Israel and the church), starts with our (and the universes) Creation, chapters 1-2 of Genesis, not Chapter 3 (the fall).
Salvation isn’t primarily about sin or sin management or sin eradication but about God restoring in humanity and in the earth the well-being of Creation; God’s creative purposes.
Of-course the reality (systemic and personal) sin has to be addressed as only Divine and human inter-active love can; which God does in Jesus of Nazareth’s birth, life, teachings, passion, death, resurrection and continuing high priestly work of Christ in us by means of The Holy Spirit until finally all the universe participates in the “Renewal of All Things”.
Salvation is this intra/inter human restoration which in The Written Word seeks first a human Community (Israel and re-born in The Church). Incarnation means that human history isn’t the context to which the real drama of death and resurrection play out in some dis-embodied soulful place called heaven.
Salvation is The Timeless God restoring (by reconciliation and re-creation) each of us complete humans and the human community.
Yes, our human tendency to worship everything and everyone (especially ourselves) instead of reverencing God and loving as God does is the real dilemma. But the dilemma is deeply personal and inter-personal. It is not an Adamic nature God died for but us! Sin is not a thing but us, communally and personally lost.
Several wisely—in my opinion—insist that only God can save us and that it is an exchange of our wounded, sinful self for Christ’s life in is. As in Ezekiel 16, God makes it clear to Israel that very same principle in the context of their judgment of Sodom and Samaria as eternally lost when declaring Sodom and Samaria actually less wicked sisters and instead promises to renew them together with Israel, but now as daughters and only when Israel finally see how great is their own sin. “How sick was your heart—the LORD God proclaims—that you could do all these things, the deeds of a hardened prostitute. I will convict you of adultery and murder, and I will hand you over in bloody fury and zeal…Nevertheless, I will remember my covenant with you when you were young, and I will establish an everlasting covenant with you… And you will remember your ways and be ashamed, when in spite of your covenant I take your big sisters and little sisters from you and give them back to you as daughters…I myself will establish my covenant with you, and you will know that I am the LORD. Then you will remember and be ashamed, and you won’t even open your mouth because of your shame, after I’ve forgiven you for all that you’ve done. This is what the LORD God says.”
(Ezekiel 16:30, 38, 60-63 CEB).
I’m so animated because we have such a narrow theoretical view, functional view of salvation as if the whole of the Bible is just back-drop or context and not the Story of Humanity’s full salvation in time… Either Jesus really is Lord now of the Kingdoms of this earth and his reign of Love fully awakened in the Jesus event so that we (The Church) live into this renewed earth already breaking in or Jesus is Lord of nothing… it’s all a lost cause, a back drop for the only thing that matters—a few (comparatively) souls get it, kinda and then go off to their real life in another time and place…
Honestly, if that’s what it’s all about and I get to live above the worst of it here and then escape to an eternal Disneyland while most of my sisters and brothers live in a veritable hell here and into the future… who wants that? In that case May God take me and receive them.
Blessings, Terry :)
Two of my books which build on some of these themes are:
”Cross Purposes: Incarnational Atonemen, Renewal & Comunal Salvation“ at: https://www.amazon.com/Cross-Purposes-Incarnational-Atonement-Salvation/dp/1521793360/ref=sr_1_2?key
“Holiness in the Twenty First Century—A Political Gospel Worth Engaging” af:
https://www.amazon.com/Holiness-21st-Century-Political-Engaging/dp/1980391092/ref=sr_1_3?keywords=Te
Comments