When the bridge is out

You see a man driving down a road. You know that up ahead of him the bridge is out. Visibility is poor tonight, though, and he seems to be in a hurry. He may not spot the broken bridge until it is too late. What do you do? Of course you flag him down or try to get him to stop.

Much of the world, we believe in the church, is heading toward a broken bridge. And yet, many of us leave it to these night drivers to notice on their own and stop before it is too late. I suppose we comfort ourselves with the belief that our heavenly flagman will step in before the final drop. We tell ourselves that no one can hear our warnings before they are ready to hear. Oddly, we do not do the same with steel and concrete bridges.

Wesleyan soteriology teaches that people are spiritually dozing at the wheel. By the preventing grace of God, those who would otherwise be dead and blind have been stirred to the first awareness of God, but most people fight off this awareness. They drown out the still small voice of God that we call conscience and race on bleary-eyed down the road.

My experience with sleepy people is that they do not like to be jolted awake. Indeed, they are often quite angry about it. So, I hesitate to stir sleepers.

But what about that bridge?

There is a fall coming.

Is it love

To let

them

drop?

Come to me, where chains will never bind you

In Eugene Peterson’s Five Smooth Stones for Pastoral Work, he discusses the meaning of the term “salvation” this way:

Salvation is the act of God in which we are rescued from the consequences of our sin (bondage, fragmentation) and put into a position to live in free, open, loving relationships with God and our neighbors.

Perhaps it is the season, but the mental image that came to my mind as I was reading was Jacob Marley from Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol,” the ghost bound in chains stalking through eternity. What we need to be saved from, in Peterson’s description, are the damaging consequences sin has for our soul and our life. It is not that we need to be sprung free from a jury trial we are destined to lose, but that we need to be cut free from the chains we have clamped to our body and soul.

In Dickens’ story, Scrooge is not only spared an eternal fate but also he is given again the ability to love and take joy in his fellow creatures. He revels in Christmas. He lead the party. He overflows with love for humanity. This is the real salvation in that story, and, if I read Peterson properly, it is how we should understand Christian salvation itself.

In the musical Les Misérables, coming soon as what looks like an awesome movie, we hear this theme of salvation in the final scene. The spirit of the dead Fantine sings to the old and dying Jean Valjean a hauting song about rest and peace after a life of struggle. Her line is one that rings in my memory ever since the first time I heard it on stage. “Come to me, where chains will never bind you. All your grief, at last, at last behind you.” This is salvation. In Les Miz, it is not found until the final act. The promise of Christianity, however, is that such salvation is near, close at hand, if we will receive it.

The gospel and salvation: Two views

In the wider evangelical community there continues to be discussion about the meaning of “the gospel.” Folks such as Scot McKnight and N.T. Wright talk about the “king Jesus” gospel as the outworking of the history of Israel. The gospel is primarily about the restoration of all creation and individual salvation takes place within this larger outworking.

Tim Keller expressed a rival interpretation of salvation and the gospel in an interview on Trevin Wax’s blog. For what it is worth, John Wesley would agree with Keller’s emphasis over McKnight and Wright, although he, of course, disagrees with Keller on several other points.

Scot and I disagree on this. But yes, I do think individual salvation needs to be kept central.

In Romans 8 Paul speaks of the renewal of creation—its liberation from decay—something that shows that ultimately God’s salvation means the renewal of the whole world, not just the salvation of individual souls. Yet in verse 21 Paul says that the creation will be brought into our freedom and glory as children of God—the glory that we as individuals have received through faith in Jesus Christ.

So rather than saying—as many do—that the main point of the gospel is cosmic salvation, and our individual salvation(s) are just part of that, it might be more accurate to say it’s the other way around. It may be that cosmic renewal is a fruit of our individual, personal salvation.

Because I read Romans 8 the way I do—I see substitutionary atonement and justification as not something that comes along with the bigger story but as the point of the spear of the Big Story.

Temper, temper

From John Wesley’s journal on December 11, 1785:

I strongly enforced St. James’s beautiful description of “the wisdom from above.” How hard is it to fix, even on serious hearers, a lasting sense of the nature of true religion! Let it be right opinions, right modes of worship, or anything rather than right tempers!

This frustrated journal note captures something at the heart of any Wesleyan theology. For Wesley, a person who said they were a Christian but did not act like one was no Christian at all. Right tempers, that is right attitudes or dispositions or habits of mind, are the mark of true religion.

This makes Wesley quite different from those who place an almost total emphasis on what people say they believe. The true sign that you really do have faith in Christ is not a statement you make, but the life you live. Proud, angry, impatient, and lust filled “Christians” are no more Christians than your run-of-the-mill pagan in Wesley’s book.

Our problem, for the most part, is that we are what Wesley would call enthusiasts. We want the benefits of religion — heaven, peace, justice — without using the means by which those benefits are bestowed by God. We do not dwell in the means of grace. We do not work out our own salvation. We often do not even desire to be transformed in heart and life. Just give us our stuff, and at a cheap price, and we’ll be on our way.

I get the impression this is not a new problem, right? Sounds like people in the Bible, doesn’t it?

But I do wonder what we should do in the face of such a reality. I wonder if we have an impoverished theology of salvation that makes it seem not worth “denying yourself and taking up your cross”? Who would cut off their right hand or pluck out their eye to ensure the kind of salvation we tend to preach — something Dr. Phil and the right pharmaceuticals can give us with a lot less crimp in our lifestyle?

In the meantime, we can spend our energy arguing about doctrine and worship styles — and church government.

Fletcher: None perish for Adam’s sin

In the midst of a controversy with the Calvinist ministers of his day, John Wesley was defended by John Fletcher in published works that would become known as the Five Checks to Antinomianism, a book of profound influence in early Methodism. Having recently acquired a copy, I have been reading it.

Here is Fletcher on Wesley’s doctrine of salvation and damnation:

In short, he would think that he had mangled the Gospel, and forgot part of his awful commission, if, when he has declared that “he who believeth shall be saved,” he did not also add, that he “who believeth not shall be damned;” or which is the same, that none perish merely for Adam’s sin, but for their own unbelief, and wilful rejection of the Saviour’s grace. Thus he advances God’s glory every way, entirely ascribing to his mercy and grace all the salvation of the elect, and completely freeing him from blame of directly or indirectly hanging the millstone of damnation about the neck of the reprobate. And this he effectually does, by showing that the former owe all they are, and all they have, to creating, preserving, and redeeming love, whose innumerable bounties they freely and continually receive; and that the rejection of the latter has absolutely no cause but their obstinate rejecting of that astonishing mercy which wept over Jerusalem; and prayed, and bled even for those that shed the atoning blood — the blood that expiated all sin but that of final unbelief.

 

What does ‘salvation’ mean to you?

She will give birth to a son, and you will call him Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins. (MT 1:21, CEB)

In John Wesley’s sermon “Salvation by Faith,” the first in his standard sermons if you are keeping track, he asks two questions. What is saving faith? What does it mean to say we are saved?

The questions highlight an important distinctive feature of Wesley’s theology. It is primary concerned with salvation. All the systematic theologians can wrestle with questions about the nature of God and the end times. Wesley was consumed by the thought he posed in the introduction to his sermons:

I am a creature of a day passing through life as an arrow through the air. I am a spirit come from God, and returning to God: Just hovering over the great gulf; till, a few moments hence, I am no more seen; I drop into an unchangeable eternity! I want to know one thing, — the way to heaven; how to land safe on that happy shore.

In the first sermon in his standard sermons, he lays out the meaning of salvation. My summary is as follows.

• Salvation begins in this life and extends into eternity.
• Salvation is being saved from sin, the guilt, fear, and power of it.
• Salvation begins with justification and ends with the perfection of Jesus Christ’s own image formed in us.
• Salvation is by grace but ordinarily is conditioned on faith.

This is Wesley’s definition and description of salvation.

What does the term ‘salvation’ mean to you?

What we do matters

Ben Witherington III writes in Christianity Today about the Wesleyan Arminian theology of salvation and why behavior matters, even for those who have been born again.

It is one of the most basic tenants of Wesleyan Arminian theology that salvation is not complete at the new birth (or justification). The Wesleyan Arminian stresses that in fact there are three tenses to salvation for the believer—”I have been saved (the new birth), I am being saved (sanctification), and I shall be saved to the uttermost (glorification).” The Arminian does not believe that a person who has only experienced the new birth has completed the salvation process, or that the rest of the process is inevitable and foreordained. Nor does the Wesleyan Arminian believe that the behavior of Christians subsequent to conversion is irrelevant to whether or not they are being sanctified presently, or will be saved to the uttermost eventually.

Two views of salvation

An Orthodox priest illustrates the Protestant (Reformed) and Orthodox view of salvation using folding chairs. (ht: Out of Ur)

I’m not sure how widespread the assent would be for the two illustrations, but I see lots of fertile ground for conversation. Wesleyans are often told that our theology owes a lot to Eastern influence on John Wesley. I’m not sure how Wesley would respond to the video.

What do you think?