Category: Salvation

Christian salvation: Do the questions never end?

~ Ted Grimsrud ~ 4 Comments

Ted Grimsrud—January 1, 2012

I keep thinking about salvation and related issues—aided considerably by various thoughtful questions and comments. My post this week will be kind of a grab bag of responses to various recent comments that relate to my three-part discussion of Jesus’ death and salvation (“Does Jesus’ death have meaning?” “Jesus’ death and my salvation,” and “Does Paul agree with Jesus about salvation?”).

Life after death

My old friend David Myers in Washington, DC, asked about (I think) salvation in relation to life after death. He wrote: I’m stuck on the word ‘saved’—its forthright, non-theological meaning, especially related to the resurrection. I get that loving God and neighbor saves us into a richer, more meaningful life than we would have if we worshiped the idols, etc. Yet that very life of salvation may well lead to getting killed. So, now we’re dead as a rock, which is a condition I’d like to be saved from. Why then doesn’t the resurrection save us, in the simple, non-theological meaning of the word?

I don’t think my points about the relationship between resurrection and salvation were meant to speak to the issue of life after death one way or another. I believe there is strong continuity between life and in the present and whatever happens after we die. By the nature of the case, we cannot say anything definitive about life after death. And the Bible as a whole is much more circumspect in speaking about that theme than much of later theology. Whatever salvation means, though, I think it should be seen to apply to both life in the here and now and life after we’re “dead as a rock.”

That is, if we enter the “life of salvation” in this life (which is clearly the concern of the vast majority of biblical talk about salvation) there is no reason not to expect continuity in the afterlife. Whatever it is that saves us in the former state surely will save us in the latter state. The problem with much Christian talk of the afterlife is that it seems to assume some kind of discontinuity—we are “saved” for the afterlife by a kind of belief that does not necessarily lead to a “life of salvation” in the present. When Jesus responds to the question about “eternal life” with his call to love God and neighbor, he clearly has in mind life in its fullness in the present—we know we are living in such love when we imitate the Good Samaritan in his risky and costly compassion. But there is no reason not to think this “eternal life” does not extent to after we “get killed” for practicing such compassion. Continue reading “Christian salvation: Do the questions never end?” →

Does Paul agree with Jesus about salvation?

~ Ted Grimsrud ~ 4 Comments

Ted Grimsrud—December 23, 2011

Jesus’ approach to salvation was simple—he bypassed the sacrificial system and offered direct forgiveness. He answered a direct question about how to inherit eternal life by reiterating what he believed was the essence of the law and prophets: love God and neighbor. He told an amazing story about a terribly sinful son who is welcomed by his father back into the family simply by returning home.

In other words, if we take our cues from Jesus himself, we should not be investing his death with the kind of meaning that sees in his death the one necessary sacrifice that might satisfy God and enable God to bring salvation about. To the contrary, Jesus echoes the prophets by insisting that God operates according to the logic of mercy, not the logic of sacrifice, payback, reciprocity, and punishment. According to Jesus, God’s justice is restorative not retributive.

But what about Christianity’s greatest interpreter of Jesus’ message, Paul the Apostle? How compatible is Paul’s understanding of salvation with Jesus? Do we have to choose between the two? I think not. In this, my third post on salvation (the first was “Does Jesus’ death have meaning?” and the second was “Jesus’ death and my salvation”), I will make that case that Paul was faithful and accurate to Jesus’ main message (with the implication that later Christianity has actually misread Paul).

Like his Jesus and the prophets, Paul understands salvation in terms of God’s merciful intention to bring healing to a broken world.  Paul does not present salvation in terms of retributive justice or a mechanistic view of God’s holiness and honor.  Salvation, for Paul, is a gift of a relational God who seeks to free humanity from its self-destructive bondage to the powers of sin and death. Continue reading “Does Paul agree with Jesus about salvation?” →

Jesus’ Death and My Salvation

~ Ted Grimsrud ~ 4 Comments

Ted Grimsrud—December 18, 2011

My earlier post on Jesus’ death (“Does Jesus’ Death Have Meaning?”) was rather heady and theological—grappling with this big question in the realm of ideas. This is appropriate, and I have been happy at the discussion that was stimulated by what I wrote.

One extended comment, from Philip Bender, challenged me to think about these issues a bit more personally and existentially. I understand the essence of Philip’s questions to be about how our beliefs about salvation, atonement, Jesus’ death, et al, actually speak to our lives, to our sense of assurance of our connection with God, to our on-the-ground appropriation of the Bible’s message of being reconciled with God.

These are some of the specific questions he raised:

• How do we appropriate Jesus atonement?

• How do personal, structural, and cosmic “at-one-ment” with God happen? How are these processes different and how are they unified?

• What does it mean to “trust in” the forgiving and transforming mercy of God?

• How do I know when I’ve trusted in it? Is it when I say that “Jesus (out of mercy) died for me”? When I endeavor to practice a life of mercy (“works”)?

Rather than respond to these questions head on, one-by-one, I will speak to the general thrust of what I perceive to be involved in these types of questions. Part of my concern in this discussion is that we let Jesus’ own teaching, and how he embodied his teaching, be our main guide. It seems to me that in discussions about atonement and salvation, this rarely happens. So let’s turn to two of Jesus’ most important accounts of how he understands salvation, two stories from the Gospel of Luke: the parable of the Good Samaritan (10:25-37) and the parable of the Prodigal Son (15:11-32).

The Good Samaritan story stands as one of the very few times that Jesus’ directly addresses the basic salvation question: “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” The Prodigal Son story has so commonly been associated with Jesus’ message of salvation that it has come to be called “the gospel in miniature.” Continue reading “Jesus’ Death and My Salvation” →

Does Jesus’ Death Have Meaning?

~ Ted Grimsrud ~ 20 Comments

Ted Grimsrud—December 11, 2011

I recently read and discussed with my Contemporary Theology class three books on atonement theology. Each answers the question of the meaning (or lack thereof) in Jesus’ death.

Hans Boersma’s Violence, Hospitality, and the Cross: Reappropriating the Atonement Tradition, sees the most meaning in the crucifixion of Jesus in his defense of traditional atonement models (his is not simply a straightforward defense of traditional satisfaction and substitutionary views, though).

J. Denny Weaver’s The Nonviolent Atonement challenges the view that Jesus’ death is necessary for salvation, but as he does still work with the language of atonement, there is some ambiguity in his treatment of Jesus’ death. The death was strictly an act of evil, not something God in any sense willed. But Jesus’ death is part of the story of salvation that in some sense is dependent upon Jesus’ resurrection. The resurrection is the saving act, but—though Weaver does not state it like this—there had to be a crucifixion for there to be a resurrection. So Jesus’ death has meaning in relation to his resurrection.

Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Parker, in their book Proverbs of Ashes: Violence, Redemptive Suffering, and the Search for What Saves Us, utterly reject any kind of positive role for the story of Jesus’ death. They believe that Christian theology that valorizes Jesus’ death, especially that sees his death as necessary for salvation, is actually advocating a kind of “divine child abuse” where the “father” requires the violent death of the “son.”

As it turns out, Boersma’s view is pretty complicated. He tries to hold together all three of the tradition models: satisfaction, moral influence, and Christus Victor. There are other arguments for the satisfaction model and its substitutionary atonement variant that are stricter. One recent example is this book by British theologians Steve Jeffrey, Michael Ovey, and Andrew Sach: Pierced for Our Transgressions: Rediscovering the Glory of Penal Substitution. The subtitle makes the stance of the authors clear.

The two approaches: Satisfaction or mercy “all the way down”

One way to approach this topic is to note that, at bottom, there are basically two ways to think about Christian salvation: the satisfaction view and the “mercy all the way down” view. Continue reading “Does Jesus’ Death Have Meaning?” →

Why Pacifism?

~ Ted Grimsrud ~ 5 Comments

Ted Grimsrud—June 21, 2011

In many Mennonite churches, the first Sunday in July is designated Peace Sunday. In recognition of that important upcoming “church holiday” (more important to me than about any other), I am posting some appropriate reflections.

As I think about pacifism these days, often my dad comes to mind.  At one point in his life, my dad was a warrior.  In 1940, more than a year before Pearl Harbor, he chose to enlist in the Army.  He certainly wasn’t a warmonger, but he felt a strong sense of loyalty to his country.

My dad spent four years fighting against the Japanese.  He was wounded, contracted malaria, and saw his best friend (whose name was Ted) killed before his eyes.  And he was proud of his service.

Only one time did he speak of the war to me, when I was 17 and facing the likelihood of being drafted myself.  My dad told me his Army experience had been good; he encouraged me to attend a military academy so I could go in as an officer.  I wasn’t tempted, he didn’t push me, and we never talked about it again.

As I reflect on this now, I find it interesting that my father grew up in a good Christian home—his father and one of his grandfathers were pastors.  Apparently, my father never saw a tension between being a warrior and being a Christian.  I think it never occurred to him that God and Caesar might be competitors for his allegiance….I wish it had. Continue reading “Why Pacifism?” →

Resurrection “Faith”?

~ Ted Grimsrud ~ 5 Comments

Ted Grimsrud—Easter Sunday (April 24) 2011

What happened on that first Easter Sunday, nearly 2,000 years ago? Does it really matter? Do we have any way, truly, of knowing?

Or, a parallel set of questions, is the Christian doctrine of Jesus’ resurrection credible? Is it helpful? Is it necessary? How do we connect (or not) our beliefs about what happened with Jesus after his death and what will happen to us after our deaths?

My entire life I have loved asking questions and desired powerfully to understand, to make sense of life’s big questions. However, issues related to resurrection never really caught my imagination. Certainly, I did not grow up with an embedded theology insisting that the belief in the resurrection was the one essential Christian faith commitment. So, I have always had a bit of a detached attitude about questions such as those stated above.

I remember as a kid going to church on Easter occasionally—one time, at least, our family got up early and went to a sunrise service (what I remember is having to get up early, not the service itself!). Of course, we had Easter egg hunts and Easter candy. But we would never have talked about the meaning of Easter in a serious way that I remember.

In the largely secular environment of my youth in rural southwestern Oregon, Easter was not very deeply ingrained in my surrounding culture. I was surprised many years later to learn, while pastoring in South Dakota, that Easter weekend was a holiday for everyone there (e.g., no school in the public schools on Good Friday). Continue reading “Resurrection “Faith”?” →

The Book of Revelation and the End of Christianity

~ Ted Grimsrud ~ 4 Comments

Ted Grimsrud—April 12, 2011

The book of Revelation was written in the early generations of Christianity. At the time of Revelation, Christianity still was in most important ways a sub-community within the broader Jewish world. There were tensions between Christians and non-Christian Jews over how best to understand the Jewish heritage and what role commitment to Jesus should play in the life of faith.

We have good reasons to think, though, that Revelation was meant to be thoroughly Jewish and an authentic expression of biblical faith centered on Torah. Jesus would have been seen not as a replacement for Torah-centered faith but as providing one way to embody Torah-centered faith. The vision of Revelation should be seen in the context of other, mostly complementary, Jewish visions of faith.

Of course, once Christianity and Judaism parted ways, the approach to faith in Revelation would be interpreted as a distinctively Christian approach. We make a big mistake, though, if we today interpret Revelation as underwriting Christian exclusivism.

One way to avoid such exclusivist readings is to approach Revelation first of all as a political vision meant to be in continuity with Abraham’s promise to bless all the families of the earth. Revelation speaks to a particular strategy of furthering this promise that has more to do with embodied ethics than with religious rituals and doctrines.

Early Christians sought to follow Jesus’ path of creating space for human flourishing that paid special attention to the flourishing of vulnerable and exploited people. Living in the “Pax Romana” that was actually characterized by profound systemic violence challenged people of good will to go against the current and created pro-human space where they could.

John’s vision in Revelation (my use of the singular for “vision” here is intentional; the many sub-visions of Revelation all serve the one overarching vision of God’s healing work among human beings) focuses not on making promises about the future but on providing a method in the present for people of good will to serve pro-human healing work. Continue reading “The Book of Revelation and the End of Christianity” →

What’s really at stake in the debate about universalism

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Ted Grimsrud—April 3, 2011

Years ago I met a guy who pastored in Canada in the Mennonite Church. He struck me as a good person, seemed pretty gifted, someone I could easily imagine being successful in ministry. But he told me (and this was confirmed by others later) that he had gotten in trouble pretty often, even lost a couple of jobs. What was the problem? He was a universalist. He believed all people would find salvation, and he was willing to state that openly.

Ever since that conversation, I have noticed that for whatever reason, universalism seems like about the worst heresy there is. It seems like, at least in circles I’m familiar with, that it is much more objectionable for Christians to be too welcoming than it is to be too strict.

I have been aware of this dynamic surfacing again in controversy among North American evangelical Christians over a new book by a young superstar pastor named Rob Bell (the book is called: Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived; here’s one long highly critical review and a here’s link to the Google page for “rob bell love wins”). Before Bell’s book was even published, some of his theological enemies caught wind that he argues for a view that struck these thought police as dangerously close to universalism.

This debate about Bell’s book is fascinating, and has stimulated me to reflect a bit more on the universalism controversy as I have experienced it over the years—and to think some new thoughts about what I think may actually be at stake. I think the real issues that matter are a bit different than those generally discussed. And, I think this in large part because of what I understand the Bible to teach. Continue reading “What’s really at stake in the debate about universalism” →