WHAT IS SALVATION AND HOW DOES IT WORK?

I. INTRODUCTION 

 In Georgia, as in Texas, people are apt to walk up and ask, Are you saved? Our Bishop in Georgia, Frank Allen, was visiting my congregation. Someon asked him, What do you say when people ask you if you are saved? Bishop Allen replied, I say "yes." That’s a joke because any other answer would lead to a conversation no one wants to have. He went on to say, he thought to himself, "yes, I have been saved, I am being saved, I hope someday to be saved." He was suggesting the Anglican answer of a 17th Century theologian, Richard Hooker. So what does it mean to be saved? How does it work? 

I don’t mean to challenge anyone’s beliefs or sell you some other idea. I just want to look at some answers that have been Christian teachings at different times in history. The ideas that are dear to some hearts are horrifying to others. Maybe that’s why Christian understandings of salvation have shifted from century to century. 

The first question is whether there is even a problem. Many people today say there is no problem. Everything is just fine. All we need to do is relax and enjoy it life. William James called that “the religion of healthy-mindedness." Norman Vincent Pealed called it “positive thinking.” But James didn’t think Don’t worry. Be happy, was a sufficient response to the hard situation of being human. St. Augustine, Freud, Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, and countless great minds have seen a dark thread running through humanity and the whole world. If there’s  no problem, then salvation isn’t an issue. If there is a problem, then we have to ask: What’s to be done about it? The various Christian answers are called atonement doctrines. 

 II. WHAT DOES THE BIBLE SAY ABOUT SALVATION? 

 Let’s start with the Bible. Biblical scholars often say there are phrases that might be elaborated into atonement doctrines. There are suggestions of eight quite different atonement doctrines on just two pages of Romans -- but no full doctrines. For the past 400 years, most of us have had a particular understanding. It comes from John Calvin and is called penal (as in penitentiary) substitution. It goes like this: God has rules. If they are broken, someone has to be punished. We break the rules, so we deserve to be punished. Jesus suffered in our stead to satisfy his Father’s need for retribution. When we see the world "for" in the Bible, we read that penal substitution doctrine into it. Christ died for us means instead of us. He took our punishment. I’m not saying that isn’t true. But some people don’t like the way God comes across in that understanding. Someone breaks the rules; God gets so angry; someone has to be die to make him feel better; so he tortures and kills his son and that makes everything ok. That isn’t a God some people can love. 

Some people cherish the penal substitution doctrine -- others hate it. It’s drawn some into the Church, but kept others out. I just want to show you there’s more than one way to look at it. Actually, penal substitution didn’t come along for the first 1,500 years of Christianity. But isn’t it in the Bible? 

Morna Hooker, a leading New Testament scholar, did an in-depth study of salvation in the New Testament. Hooker says the New Testament passages about salvation often include the word "for"-- as in “Jesus died for us.” But what does that mean? The issue is how we interpret the word "for." Calvin and many of us hear it as, “Jesus died instead of us.” But Hooker tells us that isn’t what the Bible says. The New Testament uses four Greek different words, all of which we translate as for. Three of them, peri, dia, and huper mean such things as around, for the sake of, or for our benefit. Not one of them means instead of. Jesus said, “Take up your cross and follow me” -- not “I’ll take up my cross so you don’t have to.” The fourth Greek preposition anti could mean instead but it appears only twice, and both times it suggests a different atonement doctrine called “ransom.” We’ll get to that idea in a few minutes. 

Only one Bible verse, even in translation, sounds like penal substitution. 1 Peter 2: 24 – he bore our sins in his body on the tree. But in Greek that means he took our sins to be crucified there, not that he was crucified for our sins. 

Biblical scholars often say the Bible teaches salvation but not how it works Hooker says we can’t find an atonement doctrine in the New Testament because we’re asking the wrong question. Our basic assumptions are so different from the 1st Century worldview that the New Testament isn’t answering the question we are asking. We assume that each of us is a free moral agent who makes bad choices and should have to pay for those choices. We want to know how Jesus’ death gets us off the hook. But the the Ancient World view didn’t think so much about individuals except as members of families, communities, and nations. The New Testament is concerned with the salvation of communities. 

Hooker says the closest thing to an atonement doctrine in the Bible is about covenant: A covenant is a three-way contract with the parties being person A, person B, and God. Covenants organize communities around God. We have duties to one another and those duties are holy. In Jesus’ day, the most sacred obligations were “Blood Covenants” -- solemn vows sealed by blood, often the blood of lambs. The New Testament calls Jesus “the lamb of God.” Jesus sheds his blood to seal a covenant with humanity. That covenant binds us to God and to each other. Healing our relationship with God and our relationship with each other goes hand in hand. The crucifixion is the primal ritual covenant ceremony. When I was a child, we’d cut our fingers and bleed into each other’s wounds to seal an oath of loyalty. In Jesus, God and humanity bleed into each other to form the new covenant. Before we get to the different theologies that came along after the Bible, we need to see how salvation connects with healing. 

The word "salvation" is used over and over in the Bible. We usually think of that word in legal terms. We have been condemned for our crimes. Salvation means a pardon. But that isn’t what the word means in either English or Greek. It isn’t a legal term meaning pardon. The English root is salve – as in salve, a healing ointment. It’s a medical term – not a legal term. So why do the English translators use the word salvation instead of pardon? They are translating the Greek word, sozo. Sozo literally means rescue from any kind of danger. But its most common use in Bible times was about bodily health. It meant being healed from a sickness, not pardoned from a sentence. 

There was a Greek word for pardon, apoulo. The Old Testament used the word pardon 17 times. Jesus and the authors of the New Testament knew it well, but they never used it – not once. They used sozo – seeing sin a wound to be healed -- not a crime to be pardoned. If salvation means healing, Jesus’ healing miracles aren’t just showing off his power. They’re signs of what he will do on the cross. When the Canaanite woman called to Jesus, “Lord, have mercy on my son. He has seizures and is suffering greatly,” she isn’t asking for pardon but for healing. To go a little deeper into what healing meant, after a miracle Jesus would sometimes say, “Your faith has made you whole.” He wasn’t just curing a disease. He was restoring the wholeness to people who were broken apart. We’re often scattered into different parts, feelings and thoughts rushing in different directions. Wholeness is coming back together and finding ourselves. Now let’s look different ways the Church has explained salvation through the centuries. There have been a lot of ideas about salvation through the years. I’m just telling you about some of the main ones. 

 III. RANSOM THEORY 

Around 165 A. D., St. Justin Martyr gave us the Ransom Theory. Ransom was by far the party line of Western Christianity for 1,000 years and there are echoes of it today. "Ye chosen seed of Israel’s race, Ye ransomed from the Fall . . .. " The Ransom doctrine goes like this: We have fallen into bondage to something evil that exercises power over us – that “holds us in sin’s dread sway” the hymn says. We have made our pact with the devil to get whatever it is we wanted. That’s what’s happening in Goethe’s Faust, which is based on folklore going back to Justin’s saying “we’ve sold our souls but Jesus bought them back.” The way to free us from the dark power was to pay its bloody price. Jesus ransomed us because we were hostages to evil. God in Jesus redeemed us. Redeemed means bought back. Jesus bought us back from the power that held us in sin’s dread sway to quote another hymn. Jesus, our blessed redeemer died for us, but it wasn’t to satisfy God’s need for vengeance. He died to pay our debt – not to God – but to the devil and sets us free to be ourselves again. The one demanding the blood isn’t God, but Satan. 

If bondage to the devil sounds too superstitious, we can demythologize it this way. We live out of self-interest and do what the world demands in order to give us what we want. That’s the deal we make and it costs us our freedom. So, what constitutes our bondage? Most psychologies deny that our freedom is sufficiently robust to empower us for full humanity. There’s Darwin, Freud, Skinner, Systems Theory, you name it. The prevalent theory today is from French sociologist, Paul Bourdieu, and Canadian philosopher, James K. A. Smith. They say assumptions and patterns of believing, feeling, and acting are hard-wired into us by our culture. Those patterns are so entrenched we don’t even notice them. For Justin, the problem is this bondage and the goal is freedom. Jesus paid the worldly system’s price or Satan’s price with his life. The problem is bondage and the answer is liberation. 

A shortcoming of the ransom model is that it’s all about the cross, and doesn’t see the point of the Resurrection. In the 6th Century, St. John Chrysostom focused on the Resurrection. He saw the crucifixion as setting the stage for the Harrowing of Hell. 1st Peter says that after the crucifixion Jesus “went and made proclamation to the imprisoned spirits.” Originally the Apostle’s Creed said,“He descended into Hell.” That sounded a little too shocking so we’ve changed it to “He descended to the dead.” But John Chrysostom knew it as “He descended into Hell. Hell means eternal separation from God represented by the gates that swing only one way – in – and the sign over the gate: Leave All Hope Ye Who Enter Here. According to John Chrysostom, Jesus was crucified so he could descend into Hell, then break out in the Resurrection, emptying hell and shattering the gates so that they swing both ways. 

 IV. SATISFACTION THEORY 

 Justin Martyr’s ransom theory was the main understanding of atonement until 12000 AD. In the feudal society of the high Middle Ages, St. Anselm rejected Ransom Theory, saying it allowed too much power to evil. In his day, the Church was in charge of society. He didn’t see his world as under a dark power. Bondage was not the problem since the system is good. In a feudal society, Anselm reframed salvation in a feudal way. God was the King in the hierarchy of the world. His position was clothed in honor. Disobeying God was an affront to God’s honor just as if a vassal disobeyed his feudal Lord. God’s honor demands satisfaction to preserve the system. God cannot rest until the divine honor has been vindicated. That would require sinners to go to Hell, but God loves us too much for that. So, God takes human form in order to play both roles. God crucifies Jesus to satisfy God’s honor. But it isn’t a matter of God’s wrath. He just has to save the system. 

 V. MORAL INFLUENCE THEORY 

 But is God really so insecure that God needs to torture someone to feel better? Anselm’s younger contemporary, Peter Abelard, disagreed. He taught the Moral Influence theory, which is all about love. Sin makes life miserable. The cross is God’s response. Out of love God goes to the cross to suffer with us. God plunges into the brokenness of human experience. But how does that save us? Abelard said sin isn’t breaking rules. It’s failing to love God, who is the heart of Reality, the heart of all our experience. If we don’t love God, we can’t love anyone or anything, not even ourselves, rightly. That’s why sin makes life miserable. But when we look to the cross. we see God’s love and we love God back. That restores our connection to everything. Loving God heals our core spiritual wound. 

 VI. ASSUMPTION THEORY 

 Abelard’s theory is first cousin to what St. Athanasius taught in the 4th century. It’s called TheAssumption Doctrine. Assumption means God assuming human nature. The whole Jesus story – not just the Cross – – birth, death, and resurrection -- saves us. God assumes all of human of our experience, joyful and tragic – even death. Athanasius said, That which has not been assumed has not been redeemed. Jesus rejoices and suffers with us, which means when we rejoice and suffer, we rejoice and suffer with him. Because we are united to him in life and death, we are united to him in Resurrection. The chasm of sin and death separated us from God. We couldn’t cross the chasm to God, so God crossed it to us. 

VII. THRE-STAGE SALVATION

The 16th Century theologian, Richard Hooker, offered a nuanced doctrine of salvation. He said there are three parts to salvation. Justification is being set right with God, forgiven, reconciled in relationship. Sanctification is being made holy. God loves us as we are but he loves us too much to leave us the way we are. God makes us better, makes us holy. Union means becoming one with God. 

Hooker asks two questions of each part. When does it happen and who does it? He answered Justification happened at the cross, before we are even born. Baptism is a seal to the Justification that has already happened. God does it before we exist.

Sanctification is a lifelong process. We do it with God in partnership.

Union happens in the life to come. At that point, there is no question of who did it. We are one. 

VII. CONCLUSION 

The Bible doesn’t give us a definitive explanation of salvation. There have been many explanations over the years. We aren’t bound to buy any one of them. Our salvation doesn’t depend on holding the right opinion. If one of these explanations helps brings us closer to Christ, we can think of it that way. Or we can take a little from one and a little from another. What matters is that Christ saves us.

GROUP THINK VS. FAITH

The blind man in today’s Gospel is one of my favorite Bible characters. I’d give him the Oscar for best supporting actor in a New Testament role. He gave us the hymn verse, “I once was . . . blind but now I see.”That isn’t quite what he said though. Not wrong -- but the feeling’s not right.We translate his words as “I see.” But in the original Greek, it’s just one word – Vlepo. “I once was blind. Now: vlepo.”

 

It’s emphatic like the French Voila, the Spanish Claro, or the Italian Presto. Once I couldn’t find it. Now voila. Once I didn’t have a clue. Now claro. Once I was stuck. Now presto.Once I was blind. Now vlepo. It’s a crisp, emphatic rejoinder.

 

The Pharisees didn’t like it one bit that Jesus restored this man’s sight. They knew such healing was just hocus pocus to fool rural hicks in Galilee. Now Jesus had healed someone in the city. To add insult to injury, he did it on the Sabbath.  Well that wasn’t right. So they confronted the man with an undeniable religious truth. “We know this Jesus is a sinner, so how can he have restored your sight? Just answer us that.”He replied. “You say he is a sinner. I don’t know whether he’s a sinner or not. All I know is I was blind. Now vlepo.”

You see what I like about this guy? It’s such a Zen thing to say, He physically sees while the Pharisees remain spiritually blind. So, how is it that this man could see but they couldn’t? There’s a clue in the singular and plural subjects of the sentences in our Gospel. The Pharisees (plural) speak 10 times – always, every time -- in one voice. I hear their voices in unison like the chorus in a Greek drama. Whether or not they literally spoke in unison, they all said the same thing always in lockstep because they thought in lockstep.  They say, “We know . . ..” They’re stuck in group think mentality.

 

As John Heywood said in 1546 and Ray Stevens sang in 1970, “There is none so blind as he who will not see.” Like the churchmen who refused to look through Galileo’s telescope for fear they might see something different from Church teachings, our Pharisees are afraid to look outside the box of what “we know” – “how we do things.” The only people in this story who speak for themselves (first person singular) are Jesus and the man he healed. 

 

Group think is a cataract obscuring insight into ourselves, each other, and the world. We all live in groups and every group --  political parties, churches, families, poker clubs – all of them have their dogmas and their heresies.They all try to think alike.

 

We need community. We become ourselves through relationships. We need to sing together, pray together, serve the world together.Community is good. But it can easily slip into group think conformity. Unless we keep enough self to think our own thoughts, feel our own feelings, pray our own prayers, we have nothing to bring to the community table--  be it church, family, friends, whatever. Without individual identity, we melt into a human glob.

 

The difference between community and group think conformity is just this: Community is built on love; group think is built on anxiety. Anxiety wants to control life, pin it down with certainties and rules. Then we want a group to assure us we’re right.The group think veil hangs from a rod of anxiety.

 

Our secular critics accuse Christianity of religious group think.There’s some truth in that.  Christians are fallible human beings. The Church is a fallible community. Anxiety distorts religion into everyone sticking to the same opinions, rituals, and customs. That’s religious group think. No argument.

 

But group think isn’t faith. In fact it’s the opposite of faith. It’s fear. It’s anxiously trying to tie life down with rigid rules. Faith on the other hand rachets down our anxiety by trusting Reality with an open heart.

 

When the disciples were afraid during a storm at sea,Jesus said, “Why are you afraid? O ye of little faith?” His most repeated commandment was “Do not be afraid.” The Bible says, “Do not be afraid” 365 times – once for each day of the year. John writes, “God is love,” and, “There is no room for fear in love.”

 

Faith isn’t afraid because it knows that so much is just gift. Jesus said,  “Have no fear little flock.It is the Father’s good pleasure to give you the Kingdom” -- not reward you with the Kingdom – “give you the Kingdom.”  We don’t make the sun rise, the flowers bloom, or the rivers flow. We don’t paint the shadows of bare branches on the winter snow.  We don’t have to control things by what we think and what we do. Mary Oliver wrote:

I don’t know . . .  what . . . prayer is.
I do know . . . how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed . . ..

 

Faith relaxes our minds and opens our hearts to receive these gifts.  

 

We don’t get free from group think by some heroic act of defiance. We don’t rebel against our communities. We need them. It’s faith that sets us free from group think. We get free by exercising faith.

 

One faith exercise is to notice situations we are trying to control --  then just step back and make space for the gift.We might give up fretting for Lent. We might “kneel down in the grass to be idle and blessed.” Then look around and see.

Post-Script. Quite a few people told me how much they apperciated this sermon.

They cited specific points that struck them. They asked me how to spell words I had used. But I got more people saying they could not hear it. We had tried multiple sound amplification technique and I used the best. Sound checks proved that it was working perfectly. Nonetheless, I asked people siting in different parts of the building if they could hear. They said they heard the sound check perfectly clearly. But many people could not hear the sermon. I was completely perplexed. I then reread the text and came to a suspicion the problem might not be acoustic but spiritual. 

MY POOR EARTHBOUND COMPANION AND FELLOW MORTAL

 On Ash Wednesday we talk about sin and death together. So what’s the connection? It isn’t that sin causes death. Death is the price tag for having a life to begin with.The connection is that we don’t want to think about either one. Ernest Becker's Pulitzer Prize winning book,  The Denial of Death, says, to a greater or lesser extent  we all pretend we aren’t mortal – like the Paul Simon lyric: “and so I’ll continue to continue to pretend my life will never end. . ..”No surprise there. 

But Becker goes on to show convincingly that denial of death is the psychological root  of all sorts of regrettable behaviors and our refusal to own up to them. In Christian parlance, to the extent we deny our death, we deny our sin.I once heard several people furiously denying they were racist though no one had said they were.In Georgia we used to say, “It’s the hit dog hollers.”

People accuse religion of shoring up our denial.They say it’s a pie in the sky fantasy for hiding from hard truths.Often, they’re right. Many Ash Wednesday sermons will caution people not to think about anything unpleasant. Some priests use cute variations on the imposition ashes. More than once I’ve heard: “Remember that ‘You are stardust. You are golden.’” 

There’s plenty of escapist religion.But St. Augustine, defined “sin” as precisely this kind of escapism. Sin is disengagement. Sin is denial. Religion can be sin.In Isaiah’s day, people were jumping through religious hoops so they could bypass the hard stuff.But God wasn’t impressed. He said, “On the day of your fasting . .  . you exploit yourworkers.Your fasting ends in quarrelling and strife. . .”

He had no use for petty pieties like giving up coffee, candy, or Face Book for 40 days – as if that makes us ok. He thought we had real issues to deal with – especially each other. 

Feel good religion, self-help books, and video games are all escape routes for fleeing  from the common life of family, church, and civic engagement.  Smoke and mirrors religion won’t cut it.  

God says, “Let’s get real.” This is real. We’re awash in unspoken grief that life doesn’t meet our expectations. We’re lonely. Sometimes we’re angry. Often, we’re afraid. We aren’t who we want to be, so we’re ashamed. Sooner or later, we’re going to die. It adds up to a load of unacknowledged grief we act out in unfortunate ways. That leave us with a rucksack of unacknowledged guilt. 

Theologian Luke Bretherton says we avoid guilt andgriefin two ways: denial and projection. Denial pushes our guilt, grief, and shame down below our awareness, but they don’t go away. They fester.So we project our negative feelings on scapegoats -- human screens for  the parts of ourselves we refuse to own.I’m not selfish – not manipulative – not judgmental. I’m not angry and I’ll fight the man who says I am. I don’t have the psychological baggage that afflicts everyone else. Not me. It’s the immigrants, the gays, the homeless.

Jesus said a Pharisee and a Tax Collector went up topray:“The Pharisee stood apart and prayed,‘God, I thank you that I’m not like other people – robbers, evildoers, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week (and tithe).’” 

But the Tax Collector prayed, “God have mercy on me a sinner.”He didn’t escape. He didn’t project. He owned his moral failures. It was the Tax Collector who went home justified.

If we want a Lenten discipline, let’s try this one: Withdraw our projections. The road to personal wholeness begins when we withdraw our projections. Jesus’ word for personal wholeness was “salvation.”Whoever we’re demonizing, give it up – at least for 40 days. Instead of giving up chocolate, give up a grudge. Maybe it’s someone in our family, church, or neighborhood. Maybe it’s someone we disagree with over politics. A rational disagreement is good. A principled stance is good. But passionate animosity is ineffective and fueled by projection. 

This Lent let’s withdraw our projections and look inside. When we stop blaming others and acknowledge our own sin and mortality, two things become possible:

First, we can see someone else as, in Robert Burns’ words,“my poor earthbound companion and fellow mortal. “ 

Second, we can do some serious soul-searching, cultivating a healthy self-awareness.We may find some stuff that isn’t pretty. But we may also discover the capacity to forgive ourselves for being human. We don’t have to beat ourselves up. Beating ourselves up misses the point.The point is to acknowledge our faults with Christ-like compassion. Maybe start with just one. Acknowledge one fault and forgive yourself.  Then forgive someone else.

If we practice the gentle art of self-forgiveness, we can forgive our “poor earthbound companion(s) and fellow mortal(s).” We may even forgive life for disappointing us long enough to actually live it.  Wouldn’t that be an Easter! Wouldn’t that be a Resurrection!