Full confession: I'm struggling with salvation. Well not all of salvation, just some of it. I believe in Jesus and I believe in Jesus as savior, or as the bookish theologians put it, "the benefit of Christ is salvation." But what does salvation mean. That's where my struggle is.Let's try defining salvation by examining what it does. As best I can tell, salvation fixes/heals/mends/makes whole the human condition. I can agree that I'm not perfect and I can easily make that claim about you. Fine, I can support a claim about salvation that attempts to address these imperfections or brokenness. But what is so broken about death and why do we fear it so much that the thought of overcoming death is central to our understanding of and need for salvation? Sure, there are plenty of tragic elements wrapped up with death and great is our desire to mitigate tragedy. But that's not always the case. Sometimes death is a blessing. But that's not my problem.
My problem is that salvation has to be about life after death and not so much about life before death. Why do some theologians want to dismiss the trans formative power of taking up all my broken bits and reassembling them now? What if that were to happen over and over again, and not with just me but with everyone around me? And what if someone, now made whole, attempted to create the opportunities for others, people they don't even know, to be made whole too? What would life look like now?
I want to believe that's what the Kingdom of Heaven would look like. Do you?
Peter, who is telling you salvation is all about after death? Give me a call, we can chat about practical theology.
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Will-
ReplyDeleteYes, I believe salvation includes much more than a life after death benefit. It's for that reason it concerns me that some theologians seem to gloss over the benefits for today. This posting was in response to reading "Principles of Lutheran Theology" by Carl Braaten. To me, such a point of view seems to highlight the inability of the established church to remain relevant and is missing a fantastic opportunity to do just the opposite.
And on that point we are in complete agreement. We have the most relevant news to share and somehow we make it seem, as Minnesotans say, "not so much."
ReplyDeleteI realize this is an old post, but I'll still throw in my two cents:
ReplyDeletePerhaps the "problem" is with a narrow understanding of death. Salvation from death is not merely being saved from the physical death that we all have coming to us, but it is being saved from the spiritual death that we are all entangled in even as we "live." And so, in faith, hope, and love--our life in Christ--we have salvation from doubt, hopelessness, and fear. The kingdom of God has broken into this creation. Yet, what we have now does also foreshadow an even greater salvation to come and which will include the complete end of physical and spiritual death.