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The Broadness of Salvation
A Fresh Look at the Bible’s Teaching on How We Live in ‘Right Relationship with God’
There’s a wideness in God’s mercy, like the wideness of the sea;
There’s a kindness in his justice which is more than liberty;
There’s no place where earth’s sorrows are more felt than up in heaven;
There’s no place where earth’s failings have such kindly judgement given;
For the love of God is broader than the measure of man’s mind,
And the heart of the Eternal is most wonderfully kind.
But we make his love too narrow by false limits of our own;
And we magnify his strictness with a zeal he will not own.
If our love were but more simple, we should take him at his word;
And our lives would be all sunshine in the sweetness of our Lord.
An extract from the famous hymn of Frederick W. Faber (1814-1863)
DOROTHY’S STORY
It was lunch time at the workshop I was attending and the woman who sat alongside me was puzzled, confused, hurt and just a little angry. Knowing I was an evangelical Christian she wanted to explain to me the reason for her turmoil and to ask me some searching questions. I will call her Dorothy. Her story went something like this.
Dorothy had offered to do unpaid voluntary work in a local hospice and her twenty hour week combined general care of people’s homes with spending time with the dying and their families. Dorothy saw this as a way she could help bring what she termed ‘the will of the loving Universe’ to earth.
For some of the time Dorothy had worked alongside another woman who soon let her know that she was a committed Christian and attended a large local Pentecostal church. The two women got on well and Dorothy was impressed by the other woman’s caring nature and hard work. The only occasion on which Dorothy had felt an instant barrier go up was when she had innocently shared about her spiritual journey and the help she was getting from her morning meditation. Determined to get to the bottom of the other woman’s obvious reserve at this moment, Dorothy had asked her about her own spiritual journey and views. She soon wished she hadn’t.
Like a pent-up volcano the Christian woman had launched into a long and passionate explanation. Firstly she described how she had become a Christian. This part Dorothy actually found interesting and quite moving. It was what followed which had caused her turmoil. In the course of the next fifteen minutes she found out that, assuming the woman was correct, Christians, at least the evangelical/pentecostal variety, were the only people on the face of the earth who had or could have a real relationship with God. Unless the rest of the world came to God in the way prescribed by Christians they would spend eternity in hell.
All other religious paths, said the woman, were the result of deception by Satan’s demons. The only way ‘to be saved’ as she put it, was to ‘come to Jesus’. The final shock had come when the woman informed Dorothy that in God’s eyes it didn’t matter at all if a person had lived their entire lives in caring compassionate service to other people. If they didn’t ‘believe in Jesus’ and weren’t ‘washed in the blood of the lamb’, God would send them to hell as these ‘good works’, as she termed them, were in God’s eyes nothing but ‘filthy menstrual cloths’. Besides, when caring actions were performed by non-Christians they were merely ‘humanistic good works’ and counted for nothing with God!
I sighed, shook my head and felt a rush of grief and embarrassment as it wasn’t that long ago that I too would have held to these same beliefs. Perhaps I might have explained them a little less brutally, but the woman had at least laid out starkly exactly what it is, when it’s all boiled down, that we evangelicals are supposed to believe.
The challenge was to try to briefly explain to Dorothy how come such otherwise genuinely caring people believe such things and just how they have, in certain key areas, got it so tragically wrong.
This article is dedicated to precisely the same task.
(Note: For much fuller explanation, order a copy of my book Overwhelmed by Grace from this web site.)
THE GREAT CONTRADICTION
How is it possible for evangelicals (who are without doubt in most instances among the most loving, generous and caring people on the planet) to propagate a view of divine relationship/salvation which not only makes God appear some sort of vindictive, petty, pedantic tyrant, but which forces on the post-resurrection ascended Jesus a complete change of character, turning him from the loving welcomer of those with both fuzzy morals and fuzzy doctrine, into someone equally as tyrannical as his Father?
THE GREAT DILEMMA
It is precisely because most evangelicals are such genuinely loving caring people that so many find themselves struggling to the point of deep embarrassment over exclusivist salvation doctrines which assign the vast majority of the world to eternal hell.
The reason they will, if pushed, still appear to fully endorse these narrow teachings, despite their inner misgivings, is because they genuinely believe that this is in fact what the Bible teaches, and they feel obligated to adhere to what they believe is biblical truth.
Such people believe that this is the sum total of what Jesus taught on how to come into relationship with God. They think that this what they have to believe, because if they dared let themselves think any differently they could end up as ‘apostates’ and in danger of forfeiting their own salvation!
Most, I feel certain, would love the way of salvation to be more generous, yet as they read their Bibles, conditioned as they are by two thousand years of Christian tradition which declares this to be tried and tested ‘correct doctrine’, all they can see is confirmation of this most narrow way. Even when they come across the many passages which raise serious questions about the orthodox view, they are so locked into traditional interpretations that they are unable to let the Bible speak in a more generous tone.
The purpose of this article is to say to my loved evangelical family that the Bible does teach a vastly more generous wideness of salvation. There is much biblical evidence, especially from the lips of Jesus himself, that shows a much broader basis for salvation than we have thought possible. This means that we can understand verses such as "I am the way, the truth and the life….." in ways that do not require the assigning of ninety percent of humanity to hell.
My plea is, at very least take the time (and it will take some time) to read carefully, thoughtfully and prayerfully what I share. Look up the scriptures and "consider whether these things be of God."
THE GREAT DEBATE
Increasingly among evangelical scholars debate rages about ‘the broadness of salvation’ or, as I prefer to describe it, ‘how we live in right relationship with God’. It will be one of the most important debates that the evangelical church will engage in over the coming decades. What’s more, the way these key issues evolve will determine the character, effectiveness and possibly the very survival of Christianity.
It is by no means just a Christian debate. All major world religions are struggling with their own exclusivists and fundamentalists and their own versions of ‘we have the only truth’ doctrines. The current world wide convulsions emanating from radical Islam and their desire to create a universal ‘Islamic State’ result from fundamentalist Islam’s own version of ‘we have the only approved way to God’.
This is perhaps the most important single spiritual/religious issue to confront the religions of the world today. And its impact, as we see demonstrated on our TV news night after night, profoundly affects the entire planet.
I and many others believe that almighty God is forcing the pace and challenging those of all religions to face up to the immaturity, tribalism (‘my tribe is better than your tribe’) and downright stupidity of such exclusivism. The pressure is on us all to rediscover the God whose mercy is truly like the wideness of the sea and whose love is truly broader than the measure of our at times narrow and over-zealous minds.
What is so encouraging, if we can but remove our large evangelical blinkers, is that we will find that the Bible, when taken as a whole, reveals a God very much like the generous, open-hearted deity of Fredrick Faber’s wonderful hymn.
CHRISTIAN ‘SALVATION DOCTRINES’ EXPLAINED
Over the past one hundred and fifty years in particular the views Christians hold as to the broadness of salvation have divided off into three ‘camps’.
They are, in order of popularity:
1) The Exclusivist view
2) The Inclusivist view
3) The Pluralist / Universalist view
Given that the purpose of this article is to concentrate more fully on the majority Exclusivist and Inclusivist views, I will simply outline very briefly the later minority Pluralist/Universalist view.
The Pluralist / Universalist view
As these two views are very close cousins and most pluralists would espouse universalist views I will treat them together. Put simply, Christians of this persuasion hold that somehow everyone will be saved and that as a general principle God is at work equally within all major world religions. Every major religion is, therefore, more or less equally valid and provides its adherents with a valid path to God, although it would be acknowledged that some paths make the journey clearer and so are, in that sense, easier than others. Pluralism looks askance at any missionary endeavour which seeks to convert someone from one major faith to another.
While not holding to this guiding pluralist belief, I do agree with pluralists’ conviction that every faith has something to learn from the others, and with their advocacy of a level of sharing sufficiently open and honest to enable any faith to feel it could engraft something helpful and enriching learnt from another faith.
It is important to realise that the vast majority of western societies and western governments operate from a ‘pluralist’ stance. A healthy pluralism is the necessary dominant and over-riding social glue which rightly allows peoples of widely diverse ethnic and religious traditions to live together in relative harmony.
People of pluralist/universalist persuasion are scattered among the congregations of the more liberal Christian churches. They may hold such beliefs without ever having heard the terms or labelling themselves as such.
The Exclusivist View of Salvation
Note: I fully recognise that not all evangelicals hold to the views described and criticised in this article, and this fact in itself is a hopeful sign. I stress that it is the essential evangelical bed-rock doctrines and teachings around the question of ‘how we enter into, and live in, right relationship with God’ which are examined in this article, along with the spin-offs that these views produce in the thinking and attitudes of those evangelicals who accept them in an uncritical manner.
Exclusivism has been the traditional evangelical/pentecostal salvation view, and is still held by the vast majority of people from this tradition. This is the view I was raised on and the doctrinal basis from which I preached during all the years I spent in pastoral ministry.
The exclusivist view is essentially as follows.
The crucifixion of Christ is the pivot point of all history. Most evangelicals believe that what happened on the cross changed in time and space the way God responds to people from that point onwards.
Prior to the death and resurrection of Jesus, God related to people on a fundamentally different basis from after these events. It is generally accepted that in the thousands of years before the death of Jesus there were many people, both Jew and non-Jew, who did live in genuine relationship with God. The exact basis for this Divine relationship is still often quite fuzzy in the minds of many evangelicals, but most would say it had something to do with keeping the greatest of all the commandments, "Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your strength, and your neighbour as yourself". They would feel that if, in Old Testament times, a person lived according to this standard then they were likely to be in right relationship with God and could therefore be said to have eternal life.
But after the Cross everything changed. Evangelicals believe that at some point in the midst of the crucifixion everything changed vastly for the better. Through Christ’s death on the cross a ‘new agreement’ or ‘new covenant’ was made between God and man.
There are three main parts to this new agreement or covenant. The first two are indeed very good news; the third is very bad news!
The Good News
The first part of the good news is that Christ’s death on the cross caused the defeat of Satan and his hierarchy of demons. Therefore people can now live without the crippling fear of being cursed and tormented by evil spirits, or the spirits of their own or others’ ancestors, coming back to attack them if they violate these entities’ wishes. Such news is especially freeing and powerful for those peoples who live in fear under the yoke of animism and ancestor worship. To their great credit, evangelicals have brought huge freedom to these sorts of societies through the good work of Christian missionaries.
The second positive part of the evangelical version of the good news is this. Thanks to this new way of salvation through Jesus individuals can come into and live in ‘right relationship with God’ in a way that frees them from feeling they have to strive to ‘earn’ God’s approval and love by the endless repetition of ‘right rituals’, by external sacrifices to God or the gods, by desperately striving to keep scores of picky religious laws, and/or by endeavouring in any way possible to build up sufficient brownie points to ‘merit’ or ‘earn’ Divine approval. Evangelicals will point out that on the cross Jesus died and paid the price for the sins of the whole world so that endless sacrifices etc are no longer needed. They will also point out that coming to God through Jesus Christ brings one into a really powerful sense of God’s peace and presence.
Now all of this is true and is of itself fine. It’s the ‘add ons’ which create the problems. So hold tight, here comes the really bad news
The Bad News
Evangelicals maintain that since the cross we have now entered what they call the ‘age of grace’ and that this is God’s ‘new way’ to come into relationship with him. The bad news is that this ‘new way to God through Jesus’ is now the only way acceptable to God. It is now the only way to have your sins forgiven. The ways that once brought God’s smile of welcome and approval are no longer valid. If, therefore, a person does not in their life time come to God via Jesus in the way prescribed by Christians, God will judge them and send them to hell.
Explaining away the vast injustices
Some concessions are made for small children, the handicapped and perhaps the seriously mentally ill, although on what basis these concessions could be made is never really explained. Some will concede that a very small number of exceptionally moral and compassionate ‘pagans’ living outside of Christianity’s reach just might scrape through, though this concession contradicts and clearly violates the otherwise iron-clad dogma which declares it totally impossible for anyone to be ‘saved’ by what is termed ‘good works’.
As for those multitudes of people down through history who died never having had even a chance to hear the message of Christ, some evangelicals will say that these people will be accepted if they live up to the light they have, "the law written in their hearts" (Romans 2.15). In other words, their salvation is still based on the Old Testament model.
However, this statement creates the following major problem. Quite obviously, the arrival of Christian missionaries in a country must bring at least the chance of hearing about Jesus. It therefore must bring to an end the period of ‘Old Testament style grace’. If this is the case, then the arrival of missionaries in an area instantly closes the door to salvation for those who, by virtue of their ‘good heart’, were previously in God’s favour! If this argument is correct, missionaries had better stay at home as they unwittingly become the means whereby good people are sent to hell because they suddenly become accountable in a way they previously were not.
All those who have heard and not believed or who live where, if they had bothered, they could have heard are declared to be outside of God’s grace and destined to go to hell if they die in this state.
Some evangelical Christians try to get around the awful injustices involved by saying, ‘Oh, but God knows who would have accepted Jesus if they had heard, so these ones will be saved.’ Such a statement means of course that the classic evangelical interpretation of the ‘Great Commission’ in Matthew 28.18-20, "Go into all the world and preach the good news….," immediately becomes nonsensical. Why? Evangelicals interpret the great commission as being all about witnessing and missionary work in order to save the lost from going to hell. If all those who would have accepted Christ will be saved anyway, why bother to go to all the cost, trouble and danger of going to try and save people who will get to heaven anyway? And why jeopardise their salvation by going anywhere near them?
In brief, the big mistake that evangelicals have made is this. Most have interpreted the Cross as an event stuck in time, and not as a timeless eternal event. Therefore Christ’s atoning work on the cross is seen as creating a fundamentally new way to God which cancels out the ways people were accepted by God in the period before the Cross. Most evangelicals would further claim that the only way God can forgive sin is through Christ’s work on the cross. The fact the there was full forgiveness of sin in the Old Testament before Christ even came, and that Christ himself forgave people’s sin before he died on the cross, is never explained.
All evangelicals happily acknowledge that God did forgive sin in the period bounded by the Old Testament and, at times, without the involvement of any sacrificial system. They love to read Psalms 51 and 103 describing God’s amazing forgiveness. Then, in the next breath, they will declare that God can only look on sinners through the ‘righteousness of Christ’ or on the basis of the shed blood of Jesus. If that were indeed so, how could he have ever forgiven sin in the Old Testament, when Jesus hadn’t yet come? It is their alarming lack of logic and shallowness of thought on this absolutely key subject which drives evangelicals into their exclusivistic interpretations of salvation.
They fail to realise that the Cross was first of all God’s grand drama acted out on the stage of history to show humankind the way he has always regarded us and always will. Christ was and is “The Lamb that was slain from the foundation of the world”, and the events of the crucifixion were God’s dramatisation of this cosmic eternal truth. The Cross portrayed in time and space the eternal nature of forgiveness. It showed that acceptance for mankind had been fully available and unchanged since the dawn of time, and would remain unchanged to the end of time. The Cross was not only God’s endeavour to show us how he has always felt about us. It was, perhaps primarily, about the need for us to change our ideas about what we believe is God’s attitude to us, and about what constitutes the real basis of living in loving relationship with him.
The Cross was never about an event that suddenly and vastly narrowed down the way humans could approach God. It was about a better way, a richer more powerful way of living in God than was previously available, but a way, none-the-less, firmly based on and an extension of, the time honoured Old Testament way. That is the ‘good news’ of Jesus Christ.
This wonderful good news of Jesus was never meant to suddenly cancel out the pre-cross valid God-ordained ways of right relationship. It was never, ‘From now on there is only one way, and all previous ways are, from this moment, cancelled. If you follow these ways you will be sent to hell’. What, in the name of all that’s fair and sensible, is good news about that proposition?
Note: A fuller explanation of this understanding of the Cross appears near the end of this article. Please ensure to read it as it ties everything together.
The Inclusivist View of Divine Relationship
The inclusivist view incorporates the central salvation understanding of the exclusivists, to the extent that it sees active belief in and acceptance of the risen Jesus Christ as Saviour and Lord as the most preferred and, all other things being equal, the most ‘light giving and life giving’ way of entering into Divine relationship. Coming to God by way of a conscious ‘revelation’ of just who Jesus really is and the deliberate giving of oneself totally to the risen Christ does, again all other things being equal, invoke great spiritual power and divine presence.
Inclusivists differ from exclusivists, however, in their belief that the Bible, when taken as a whole, teaches quite clearly that God also accepts people on criteria which do not have to involve any conscious knowledge of, belief in, or faith in Christ. Such a belief acknowledges that it is possible for those of other religions, or even those with no conscious religious understanding, to come into valid relationship with God.
The ‘Righteous Pagan’ Understanding
Inclusivists believe that having inadequate, downright false, or in fact no Christian understandings or beliefs, is not the real issue in God’s eyes. What opens the door into divine relationship is the state of a person’s heart, not their doctrine! The key issue is whether a person lives their life closely aligned to the things that are dearest to God’s heart. Of course, it is much better if a person does have conscious understandings and beliefs. This makes further growth into God’s will much more likely. But most inclusivists believe that there are many non-Christians whose lives show with consistency the ‘fruit of the Spirit’, despite their having no Christian beliefs as such. To therefore write them off as ‘lost souls’ solely because of their lack of correct Christology or doctrine is a denial of Jesus’ clear teaching, "By their fruits (not their doctrines) you will know them". Inclusivists believe that these ‘righteous pagans’ do live, albeit unknowingly, in relationship with the God of the universe and therefore will be welcomed into heaven on death. As a wise old Christian once said, "Some of the finest Christians I have ever met are atheists."
A Critique of the Exclusivistic Understanding of ‘Right Relationship with God’
What follows must, of necessity, be brief. For a much fuller treatment I suggest the serious reader obtains a copy of the excellent book A Wideness in God’s Mercy (ISBN 0-310-53591-3) by Doctor of Theology Clark H Pinnock. Dr Pinnock is a highly respected conservative evangelical scholar who has over recent years, like many of us, experienced the call to go back to the Bible and re-examine the pessimistic doctrine of exclusivism. His book is a scholarly and powerful rediscovery of the generosity of God and his Christ.
My own book (self published) Overwhelmed by Grace also looks in depth at this issue. It critiques the exclusivist position in a different way from Dr Pinnock’s book and covers some new material. Both books are very much in harmony with each other. Overwhelmed by Grace can be ordered from this website.
How this Exclusivist View Came About
Evangelicals can present a highly convincing argument for their exclusivist interpretations of salvation theology, as long as they stick to John’s Gospel and to the letters and words of Peter and Paul. It is from these books that most of the key exclusivist verses and passages are taken – for example famous passages like John 3.16 and 14.6; and Peter’s Acts 4.12 statement, among others. If these were the only definitive statements in the New Testament regarding the way to live in relationship with God and, most importantly, if these were the only statements we had from the lips of Jesus, the exclusivist evangelical position would be very strong.
However these are not the only teachings we have. In the synoptic gospels Matthew, Mark and Luke, Jesus consistently details a very different way of coming into divine favour and relationship. (These scriptures are discussed shortly.) Yet such passages are virtually ignored by evangelical exclusivists. On the few occasions when they do merit comment they are given the most cursory and offhand treatment, which is not surprising as all of them create major problems for exclusivist salvation theology.
The great mistake made by exclusivists down through the centuries has been to interpret the very different salvation teachings of Jesus as recorded in the synoptic gospels entirely in the light of John’s gospel and the writings of Peter and Paul, when, in fact, they should be interpreting John and the other apostles in the light of Jesus’ teachings in the synoptics! Jesus is, after all, supposed to be our ultimate authority.
Why Give Prominence to the Synoptic Teachings?
The major reason is that the synoptic gospels were written, at very least, twenty years earlier than John’s gospel, and all three are based on a much earlier source document which scholars call ‘Q’. Scholars estimate that Q was written within a very few years of Jesus’ departure from the scene, some would say as little as a year or two later. In contrast, John’s Gospel seems to be based entirely on the memory of the writer and is variously dated between 75 and 105 CE. Most Bible scholars will date it at around 90 CE. This is at least fifty years later than the likely date of the Q material! Long enough for even the most inspired memory to fade somewhat.
The rules of historical process rightly regard as most reliable those eye-witness accounts written closest to the events being described. That being the case, the earlier dated synoptic gospels must stand as the final judge and interpreter of the much later John’s gospel. Virtually all scholars, evangelicals included, recognise that there are major differences between the synoptics and John’s gospel, to do with the timing of key events and the contents of some of Christ’s teaching. The vast majority of lay church goers would have no knowledge of this fact, as few pastors ever point it out.
Wherever such differences occur, it is always the synoptic gospels’ version that must be seen as the more reliable. To make John’s version of salvation theology the basis on which the rest of the Bible, and especially the synoptic gospels, is judged and interpreted, is not merely poor scholarship but a potentially dangerous method of trying to arrive at truth. Just how dangerous is shown by this next point.
Evangelicals have unwittingly become followers of the Apostles before they are followers of Jesus Christ. In terms of their salvation doctrine, most evangelicals are, for all practical purposes, followers of Paul and John rather than being firstly followers of Jesus!
Let us put it even more starkly. Although entirely unconscious of their attitude, most evangelicals treat the teachings of the Apostles as, at very least, just as inspired as the teaching of Jesus Christ! In fact, at a practical level, it is as though many regard the Apostles’ teachings as even more inspired than those of Jesus. This is demonstrated by the fact that in any debate over the broadness of salvation exclusivist evangelicals will base their arguments almost solely on Paul, Peter or John and will tend to avoid both the synoptic salvation teachings of Jesus and the similar approach to salvation presented in the book of James, Jesus’ brother. In fact, Martin Luther, the founder of the Protestant Reformation and great champion of all things Pauline, went so far as to state that the book of James should be removed from the Bible as it laid too much emphasis on ‘good works’ as a means of salvation.
BIBLICAL EVIDENCE FOR THE GENEROSITY OF GOD
The Bible teaches a far broader and more generous basis for valid Divine-human relationship than is traditionally imagined. This broadness and generosity is seen clearly in the Old Testament scriptures, but it is at its most radical in the teachings and example of Jesus Christ as recorded in the synoptic gospels.
The Generosity of God in the Old Testament
"For the eyes of the Lord run to and fro across the whole earth to show himself strong on behalf of those whose hearts are hard after and committed to him." 2 Chronicles 16.9
For both Jew and gentile, Divine relationship in the Old Testament revolved around the state of a person’s heart and their commitment to costly genuine goodness. It had little, if anything, to do with the accuracy of any individual’s theological beliefs, which even among Jews, could be very mixed at the best of times. Even when, in the case of the Jews, the sacrificial system was emphasised, it was seen to be pleasing to God only when performed out of a sincere heart by a person who was striving to live an ethical God-committed life.
It is essential to really appreciate just how widely diverse would have been the beliefs and ‘theologies’ of those in the Old Testament to whom God related favourably. Melchizedek, for example, was the Canaanite priest of a god called El Elyon, or God Most High. Jethro, the father-in-law of Moses, was a pagan priest of Midian. The list goes on and includes the likes of Noah, Enoch, Balaam and Job, none of them in the covenant of Abraham. Then there are the pagan kings like Cyrus and Nebuchadnezzar, who are described by God as ‘my friend, or my servant’.
It is clear that, despite their obviously mixed and often undoubtedly false theological understandings, God was happy to accept all of these individuals and to relate with them to the level each could manage. In every instance God shows himself to be flexible and accommodating. How different he is from the petty, pedantic tyrant God of evangelical theology who willingly consigns millions to hell for failing to grasp and accept the at times highly contradictory, confusing and badly explained version of ‘good news’, such as the one presented to Dorothy so starkly yet accurately by the Christian woman, and shared in the story which opens this article.
The generosity of God in the Synoptic Gospels and Jesus’ Teaching: What the Synoptic Gospels, and Jesus’ teaching in particular, tell us about ‘entering into right relationship with God’
Note: In the following references I point to some of the numerous occasions on which Jesus taught about ways of entry into and living in divine relationship that did not involve any ‘belief in’ or ‘commitment to’ himself. I am of course fully aware that there were many other occasions when he did speak in this ‘believe also in me’ way.
The point I am making is that while the evangelical church has said there is only ‘one way’ into a valid relationship with God, namely through conscious belief in and commitment to the risen Christ, Jesus clearly did not restrict ‘salvation’ to just this one way of entry. In the synoptics, Jesus repeatedly teaches that there are other heart-based attitudes and their resulting ‘goodnesses’ which also receive the smile and welcome of God and his Christ. Whatever Jesus meant when he said, "I am the way, the truth and the life; no man comes to the Father but by me," he could not have meant it in the way the evangelical church has interpreted it.
Later I will give what I believe is a far more likely interpretation of John 14.6 and similar passages - an interpretation that does not assign ninety percent of the world’s population to hell!
The visit of the Magi at the birth of Jesus: Matthew 2
It is a startling fact that three Zoroastrian astrologer-priests from the region of modern day Iran were in enough of a relationship with God to find themselves included in the great drama of the birth of the Christ. Certainly, if a committee of evangelical church leaders had done the deciding as to who was to be part of this great event they would have rejected out of hand the very notion of including pagan astrologers.
While not a direct teaching on ‘salvation’ as such, this remarkable inclusion does say a lot about the truth stated many times in the Psalms and Prophets that God is not just the God of Israel but the God of the Nations as well. It is also a classic example of the fact that at no time had God left himself without witness. The involvement of the magi in Christ’s birth powerfully confirms the Prophet Hanani’s assertion (2 Chronicles 16.9) that not only do “the eyes of the Lord run to and fro across the whole earth” but that what counts, at a essential level, are hearts committed to God and directed away from ‘self’.
The Beatitudes - The way of ‘Good Heart’: Matthew 5.1-12
Here, in perhaps the most famous and important of all Christ’s teachings, he lists the qualities which clearly establish and maintain a relationship with God. At no point does Jesus teach that in order to live in this state of ‘blessedness’ any type of ‘believing in’ or ‘commitment to’ him is required. While some have tried to argue that the ‘blessedness’ talked about here is something less than salvation, even the conservative Amplified Bible translates the word ‘blessed’ as "spiritually prosperous [that is, with life-joy and satisfaction in God’s favour and salvation]."
Another favourite defence against the obvious implications of these teachings of Jesus is, "Oh, but these people are already followers of Christ; they are already ‘believers’." However, it is abundantly clear that the first seven of the Beatitudes apply to all ‘those’ who are poor in spirit, ‘those’ who mourn, or are meek, all ‘those’ who hunger and thirst after righteousness or are merciful, all ‘those’ who are pure in heart, who make peace or who are persecuted because of their right heart and actions. This use of the ‘general plural’ by Jesus is a deliberate reference to and implies the deliberate inclusion of all those who do these sorts of things, and not just some tiny select group. These first seven Beatitudes are universally ordained immutable Divine principles which apply to the entire human race.
The inclusiveness of these initial Beatitudes is made even clearer when, in verse 11, Jesus deliberately narrows the application, changing the ‘the’ and ‘those’ to ‘you’, as in ‘you disciples of mine’. Why? Because here in this beatitude he is speaking specifically just to his disciples about the inevitability that they will undergo persecution because of their loyalty to him. This change in language shows that the first seven beatitudes have to be addressed to ‘any and everyone’ who does the things mentioned.
The way of ‘Quiet Generosity’: Matthew 6.1-4
In these verses Jesus again shares what is a universal Divine principle. Here also there is no suggestion that his teaching applies to his followers only and to no-one else. We can all easily imagine a situation where a non-Christian living life along these lines receives God’s blessings in this life as promised, without being conscious of their true source. This is the powerful Divine life-principle of ‘what you sow you reap’ at work. What we can’t easily imagine is that when this person dies the God who blessed them for their consistent generosity then turns around and shuffles them off to hell because they failed to get the ‘believe in Jesus’ part correct. Yet if you hold an exclusivist approach to salvation this is what you are forced to conclude, no matter how unfair and churlish it sounds. Surely the God of the Bible is not this petty!
The Way of Forgiveness: Matthew 6.9-14
In the process of teaching his disciples the wording of what we call the ‘Lord’s Prayer’, the most loved and quoted of all prayer guides, Jesus does not mention anything to do with himself. Nor does he include any clause or prayer that requires the person praying to pray in his name or to refer to or ‘believe in him’. The focus is totally on a person’s relationship to the Father and to others.
Here the conditions for having one’s sins forgiven have nothing to do with accepting Christ, but everything to do with being willing to ‘forgive those who sin against us’.
We are reminded again that there was full forgiveness of sin before the death of Christ on the cross, as was also clearly taught in the Old Testament. This must surely alert us to the fact that there has to be something wrong with the evangelical view which sees the fundamental basis for the forgiveness of sin suddenly changing from the cross onwards.
The way of the ‘seeking heart’ and narrow gate: Matthew 7.7-14
In this most important and often misunderstood teaching, we find the way to God opening wide to those who ask, seek and knock. Once again Jesus does not say that the seeker must of necessity seek via himself in order to receive the good gifts of the Father. Unlike exclusivist theology, Jesus does not seem at all offended that a person can come into a genuine saving relationship with God the Father in a way that does not require conscious seeking of, and commitment to, God the Son.
What is most important is that in verse 12 Jesus, as he does on other occasions, deliberately puts a magnifying glass over the most central and foundational of all Divine commands, "In everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the [entire] Law and Prophets." The Jews referred to this commandment as either the ‘Great Commandment’ or the ‘Royal Law’ (see James 2.8). We know it as the ‘The Golden Rule’.
In the very next words that come out of his mouth, Jesus talks about "the narrow gate - the narrow road, that leads to life". This immediately raises an all important question. Just what is this ‘narrow gate’ - this ‘narrow road’ that leads us into life?
The context of the passage makes it absolutely clear. The narrow way/road that leads to life is not Jesus Christ. It is the greatest of all commandments, the Golden Rule! "In everything,” declares Jesus, “do to others what you would have them do to you." It is this immensely costly life-style which separates the ‘sheep’ from the ‘goats’, a life-style so intrinsically inimical to self-interest that those who walk this way are few.
The ‘Narrow Way’ is not Christ! This will come as a huge shock to evangelicals. It certainly did to me! I used this ‘narrow gate’ passage frequently in evangelistic sermons, loudly proclaiming what all evangelicals have been brought up to believe, namely that the ‘narrow way’ is Jesus Christ. But clearly this is not what Jesus is saying. To emphasise the fact even more, in his very next words Jesus immediately launches into a discussion about ‘good and bad fruit’.
The True Test of Divine Relationship: Matthew 7.15-23
Jesus’ logic is brutal and relentless. Good trees produce ‘good fruit’, bad trees produce ‘bad fruit’. Therefore, if you find a person who, while obviously not perfect (who is!), produces consistently ‘good fruit’ you will have found a person who is on the narrow way and one who is living in the state of ‘eternal life’. Here this state of ‘eternal life’ is not based on any believing in or commitment to Christ, but is the direct outcome of a life that seeks those things that are ‘dearest to the heart of God’. What is it that sums up this great heart-beat of God? It is nothing other than "Do to others what you would have them do to you"!
Jesus goes further and says something that still sends disturbing shivers down the theological spines of evangelicals. He declares that not everyone who confesses the Lordship of Jesus Christ and can claim success in prophecy and demonic deliverance in Christ’s name will automatically enter the kingdom of God. Evangelical consternation arises because Jesus’ declaration appears to radically fly in the face of what Paul would later assert in Romans 10.9, “That if you confess with your mouth, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.”
But Jesus is quite specific. Only those who do "the will of my Father in Heaven" qualify for the kingdom. And what is the will of the Father? Once again Jesus spells it out. ‘The will of the Father’ in this Matthew 7 teaching, is not ‘faith in Christ’. It is nothing other than the ‘Golden Rule’. These ‘good trees’ are, to change the metaphor (7.24-27), those whose lives are ‘built on the rock’ of the golden rule. These are the wise men and women who survive the storms of life.
How to ‘inherit eternal life’, according to Jesus: Luke 10.25-37
A Jewish lawyer comes to Jesus and tests him with the question, "What must I do to inherit eternal life?" Once again the reply Jesus gives is not the sort of answer that either the early church Apostles or later evangelicals would ever offer. Jesus unequivocally states that the keeping of the great commandment, "Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, strength and mind and your neighbour as yourself," will ensure that a person inherits eternal life. "Do this and you will live," are his exact words.
Such radical simplicity was immensely threatening to the established Jewish religious system of the day. With this one statement, Jesus had dropped an ‘atomic bomb’ into the midst of hundreds of years of accumulated ecclesiastical Jewish baggage, burning to the heart of what the great commandment had always taught – a simple yet radically costly way of living in right relationship with God and with one another. What obviously scandalised the Jewish authorities was that what Jesus was saying undermined the need for Torah, priesthood, Temple and perhaps even the sacrificial system itself.
Divine relationship, Jesus reiterates, is all to do with the state of a person’s heart. Their treatment of others will be an accurate reflection of that heart state. In saying what he did, all Jesus was doing was repeating what the Great Commandment had said all along, and what the prophets Isaiah, Jeremiah and others had thundered at Israel hundreds of years earlier. But Jesus hadn’t finished, and his ensuing story about the ‘Good Samaritan’ would have hit his audience like atomic explosion number two!
In this famous story Jesus makes the hero a man from the hated Samaritan sect. In his wonderful book Desire of the Everlasting Hills, biblical historian Thomas Cahill writes of the Jew’s hatred of the Samaritans:
“There is no hatred so intense as odium theologicum - hatred for those nearby who are religiously similar to oneself but nevertheless different. For them [Samaritans] the Jews reserved a contempt they did not display even towards gentiles." (1)
It would have been impossible for any Jew in the listening crowd that day not to have realised instantly the unmistakable and none too subtle inference of his story. Jesus was making the monstrous claim that a despised Samaritan heretic had ‘eternal life’, by virtue of the fact that he had kept the commandment to ‘love your neighbour as yourself’. Even worse, if that were possible, was Jesus’ clear message that members of the Jewish religious élite did not have eternal life, because they had chosen to break the same great commandment!
The Samaritan/New-Age Comparison
I suspect that if Jesus were telling this story today he might well substitute ‘New Ager’ for Samaritan. Modern day evangelicals have their own version of Samaritans. They are those people who seek the Divine by way of alternative spiritual paths, with little regard for orthodox Christian doctrines. Sure we don’t hate these folk with quite the same venom as the Jews did the Samaritans. Yet without doubt they are still our odium theologicum. Tragically, most evangelicals are vastly more at ease with the rank materialist than with the committed ‘new age’ disciple, despite their having a similar genuine hunger to live life aligned to Divine will.
Without much doubt, if Jesus were to today tell modern evangelicals the story of ‘The good New Ager’, he would stir up a very similar hostile response, especially given that the point he was pile driving home with the subtlety of a sledge hammer was that even a ‘heretic’ committed to living out the costly lifestyle of the golden rule has ‘inherited eternal life’ and is, in evangelical-speak, ‘a saved soul’.
It is very important to realise that clearly Jesus did believe that the Samaritans held significantly mistaken ideas. He showed this in his remarks to the Samaritan woman he met at the well (see John 4.22). In that encounter Jesus doesn’t pull any punches in telling the woman that the Samaritans have got it wrong in some areas, yet he in no way makes the correction of these false ideas a requirement of her coming to God in a fuller way. Her incorrect doctrine appears to have been a complete non-issue with Jesus in so far as getting right with God went. This was in total contrast to how the Jews saw ‘right relationship with God’ being established. It is also in total contrast to how evangelical Christian salvation formulas say you ‘get saved’!
In Summary
Quite clearly, no Christian following the traditional evangelical salvation formulas could or would ever have told the lawyer in Luke 10.27-28 what Jesus told him. Nor could they have told the story of the Good Samaritan/New Ager. In fact, to any exclusivist carefully reading this passage (if they are honest), Jesus’ teaching has to sound like rank heresy. Once again this starkly illustrates the fact that most of Christ’s synoptic salvation teachings are clearly broader and considerably more flexible than traditional evangelical salvation understandings.
The Last Great Judgement, and The Way of ‘Persistent and Costly Goodness’: Matthew 25.31-46 (the big passage)
It is essential to grasp the fact that in this, Jesus’ only comprehensive teaching regarding the great last judgement, he is obviously referring to what happens at the end of the world. Not only does this judgement come upon those people who lived in the time of the old covenant prior to the Cross, but of necessity to all those who live after the Cross, in what is referred to as the ‘age of grace’ or the period of the ‘new covenant’.
This fact is of extreme significance, as exclusivists will usually try to explain away ‘salvation through keeping the Great Commandment’, maintaining that this applied only in the period of the ‘old covenant’ and was made redundant by the Cross and the arrival of the ‘new covenant’. Yet the teaching recorded in Matthew 25 makes this explanation impossible!
In this chapter of Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus gives a graphic account of the last judgement. The good guys are the sheep and they are sent on into the joy of eternal life. The bad guys are the goats and they are sent to eternal punishment. What is absolutely scandalous to any evangelical brought up on ‘salvation by faith alone’, is that here we have Jesus, without the slightest hesitation or hint of embarrassment, setting forth a final judgement clearly based not on salvation by faith or ‘belief in Jesus’, but on heart-based goodness, where the only entry criterion is in effect the Royal Law of "doing to others what you would have them do to you".
Note also Jesus’ similar statement in Matthew 16.27: “For the Son of Man is going to come in his splendour…. and then he will render account and reward everyone in accordance to what he has done.”
While in pastoral ministry I could never bring myself to preach on either of these passages, as they so jarred my exclusivist views. I simply did not know how to understand them. I had read various commentaries by conservative scholars, and none of them made much sense. One commentator tried to say that the ‘brethren’ or ‘brothers’ whom Jesus talked about were ‘Christians’. According to him, Jesus was saying that people who do nice things to Christians will go to heaven. This explanation seemed totally off the wall as it was clear from the story that this was the ‘last judgement’, this was the ‘big one’, when all of humanity was finally lined up. If what this commentator was saying was true, then the only people who could be called ‘sheep’ and who, accordingly, would make heaven, were those non-Christians who had helped Christ’s ‘brothers’! Where were all the Christians who thought they were getting to heaven by faith and by committing their lives to Jesus? They had to be counted among the goats. The whole interpretation was a nonsense.
To get around this problem another commentary offered the same ‘brothers’ equals ‘Christians’ explanation but then used some fancy eschatological foot-work to say that this was a ‘special judgement’ of ‘the nations’, the judgement for non-Christians only. The Christians were apparently already in heaven. This sounded a better option - for about ten seconds! I then realised that any version of this theory creates two huge problems.
Firstly, while the Christians supposedly got to heaven by faith alone, or ‘believing in Jesus’, all these non-Christian ‘sheep’ got into heaven in effect by ‘good works’. There simply wasn’t any way around this conclusion. That is what the text says. Yet we evangelicals all knew that "It is by grace that you are saved, through faith…. not by works, lest anyone should boast." (Ephesians 2.8)
The second huge problem was the vast unfairness involved. Think about it. According to this theory, non-Christians who did selfless compassionate things to other non-Christians didn’t matter a toss to Jesus. Apparently he couldn’t care less how any individual treats non-Christians - a literal case of "you can all go to hell as far as I’m concerned". Quite obviously, millions of non-Christians would never meet a Christian in their entire life. They are all destined for hell simply because they have been born at a time in history and in a country where there are no Christians to be nice to! Quite apart from being seriously ridiculous, this concept turned Jesus into a callous, uncaring despot. It was all just too much for me to get my head around so I did what most evangelicals do. I let my eyes glaze over and I flagged it, putting it in the too hard basket.
It is only as we have the honesty and indeed courage to face up to the obvious and plain meaning of the text and make our traditions bow before the clear teachings of Christ, that suddenly things start falling into place, leaving us scratching our heads as to why we didn’t see their simple yet deeply profound meaning in the first place.
The Thief on the Cross: The Way that Breaks All the Rules (even the rule of the Great Commandment!) Luke 23.39-43
One of the things that must have infuriated the Jewish leaders most would have been the impossibility of fitting Jesus into any sort of comfortable or definable ‘theological box’. The fundamentalist mind-set hungers more than anything else for the protection which boxes offer. Protection from the thing that unnerves them most of all, namely ‘not having all the answers to all the questions that in their eyes matter’. Protection, in other words, from mystery and paradox. Jesus was far too mercurial for the likes of the Jewish leaders. One minute he would sound thoroughly orthodox, the next like a raving liberal heretic. Labelling or ‘boxing’ him was an impossibility.
Jesus was breathtakingly free of rigid doctrinal formulas. So free in fact that he was able to approach each seeking individual quite differently and uniquely. His only ‘doctrine’ seems to have been ‘agape’ love. Although he clearly held the Great Commandment as a primal guiding salvation principle, the crucifixion encounter recorded so simply by Luke shows that Jesus was able, if the need arose, to interpret it so flexibly as to make any fundamentalist shudder.
Accordingly, his answer to the thief’s plaintive request to ‘remember me when you come into your kingly glory/kingdom’ broke all the rules and shows Jesus’ freedom from any controlling salvation dogmas. For in assuring the thief that on that very day he would be with him in paradise, Christ overrode, or at very least radically re-interpreted, even the Great Commandment ! Had he held this great command in an iron-clad way he could have only responded to the thief with, "Sorry, mate, all your life you have obviously not loved the Lord your God with all your heart and you have also not lived your life treating people as you would want them to treat you. Now it is far too late to do anything about that, so it’s off to hell for you." Instead, Jesus heard the man’s heart and his amazing confession as to the true identity of this carpenter from Galilee. Christ’s response to him can only be described as ‘pure grace.’
(And lest it be said by some evangelical bush-lawyer, "See, the new covenant of grace has started. From now on salvation is only by believing in Christ," it should be noted that Christ was still alive on the cross, he was at least three hours away from crying out, ‘It is finished’, and from his subsequent death. So clearly, if one wants to gets picky, the old covenant was still in force.)
What this and other gospel stories so powerfully illustrate is that Jesus had no one fixed approach to coming into relationship with God. On some occasions he clearly did direct a person to himself, telling them to believe in and to commit to him, but on many other occasions he did not, directing them instead to respond to the Father. With others he didn’t bring either the Father or himself into the equation, and instead directed them to some necessary moral and ethical reform or action. An obvious case in point would have been the woman taken in adultery.
The True Nature of Repentance in the Gospels
It is in the thief’s reaching out to Jesus and in Christ’s response to him that we are given a clue to perhaps the most vital ingredient of human salvation response. Namely, some level of sincere heart-based repentance.
In the gospels repentance is best described as a ‘turning away from selfishness’ and a ‘turning towards’ God and/or those things closest to God’s heart, as in the core heart-based attitudes expressed in the Beatitudes and the Great Commandment. It is important to see that Christ’s version of ‘turning’ is quite different from and more flexible than the classical evangelical version. Evangelicals totally limit the idea of ‘turning’ to turning away from moral sins toward the person of Christ. Perhaps, on a good day, turning to ‘God’ might just suffice, but this would need to be quickly followed by ‘believing in Jesus’ as well.
Yet for the synoptic Jesus, the subject to whom a person turned could be any one of, or any combination of: Father God, Jesus himself, or the ‘brothers /sisters’ of Jesus. When Christ said, in Matthew 25.40, "In as much as you have done this to the least of these my brothers, you have done it unto me," he made it clear that it was sufficient for a person to have turned away from the rule of ‘self-firstness’ and turned towards another needy human being (represented by Jesus’ ‘brothers’) in costly love and compassion. As Matthew 25.31-46 shows, in Jesus’ eyes these acts alone have the power to connect the doer in salvation relationship even where no specific conscious belief in or commitment to the Father and/or himself is involved.
Peter and Paul Discover the Generosity of God
The Roman Centurion Cornelius: Acts 10
A key question to ask from this passage is, "Was Cornelius in a ‘saving’ relationship with God before he met with Peter?” Let me put it more plainly. “If Cornelius had dropped dead prior to Peter’s sermon to him, would he have gone to heaven or hell?"
One would have to regard God and Christ as shockingly vindictive and pedantic to be able to declare with any conviction that Cornelius was a candidate for hell prior to Peter’s sermon. Yet this is precisely what most evangelicals think, believing as they do that this is what the story teaches. However, any careful reading of the full story will show that nothing could be further from the truth.
Luke’s account clearly teaches that Cornelius was in a saving relationship with God before Peter preached to him. Nowhere in Acts 10 is there anything which says that Cornelius was only, in effect, ‘close to the kingdom’ and therefore in need of a dose of sound doctrine from Peter to bring him into salvation.
I suggest the reader carefully reads Acts 10, as space does not permit the retelling of the whole story. A summary of the key points will have to suffice.
Note Luke’s great honesty. The fact that Luke, the writer of Acts, faithfully recorded this account just as it happened, despite its implications for Peter’s reputation, speaks volumes for his integrity as a factual historian. As we will see later, in Acts 11.13-14 he was even prepared to report Peter as saying something which was not only at variance with the facts but also showed up Peter’s slowness to understand what had been revealed to him.
In Acts 10.1-8 Cornelius and his household are described in glowing terms. Cornelius is said to be "devout and God fearing; he gave generously to those in need and prayed to God regularly."
Next an angel appears to Cornelius and tells him "that his prayers and gifts to the poor have come up as a remembrance before God." He is instructed to send to Joppa and have Peter brought back, though the angel gives no reason for this instruction. He certainly does not suggest to Cornelius that Peter is going to tell him ‘how to be saved.’
Acts 10.9-16 records Peter’s vision. In Joppa Peter has a vision designed to challenge to the core his Jewish mindset, with its deeply ingrained and exclusivist understandings of purity. Three times God tells him in the plainest of language, "Do not call anything impure that God has [already] made clean." Peter is still wondering what to make of all this when Cornelius’s servants knock on his door, and the Holy Spirit tells Peter he is not to hesitate to go with them to meet their master the Roman centurion Cornelius. Read the account of Peter’s visit in Acts 10.23-33.
Acts 10.34 records Peter’s great revelation, which he only partly understands. Because of the honesty of the Bible with its heroes, if we know anything about the wonderfully human Peter we know that he did not always grasp things quickly or fully and indeed at other times he was quite capable of missing the point altogether. We know that both Jesus and, much later, Paul had to rebuke him for significant failures in understanding on important spiritual issues. So it is not surprising that Peter fails to grasp the full implications of not only his own vision from God but his encounter with Cornelius and the revelations it brings.
As Peter listens to Cornelius’s experiences with the angel, at last some of the drachmas begin to drop! He cries out, "I now realise how true it is that God does not show favouritism but accepts men from every nation who fear him and do what is right." It couldn’t be any clearer. Cornelius is already fully accepted by God, already a saved soul. Precisely because of this, God is about to reward his ‘good and faithful servant’ with an even fuller revelation of himself. Cornelius is to have the huge privilege of hearing about Jesus, not because he and his household need to ‘come into salvation’ but in order to deepen or complete Cornelius’s already rich relationship with God and to gift him with the increased blessing that greater light and truth always bring.
It seems, however, that Peter comprehends the implication of only half of the message he blurts out. While he suddenly realises that ‘good’ gentiles are acceptable to God (a huge leap in itself for any Jew of the time) he undoubtedly still imagines that this can only mean that gentiles are now, as a result of the Cross, potentially able to be saved, as long as they complete the process by believing in Jesus. But Peter (along with much of the evangelical Church ever since) fails to understand the fullest meaning of the visions given him, namely that God, as the Jewish scriptures clearly teach, has been in relationship with gentiles of good heart ever since time began and will be until the end of time! As far as God is concerned, Cornelius and all those like him down through time have always been ‘saved’
He fails to grasp that with the Cornelius’s of this world, the role of the evangelist is not to cast condescending aspersions or to call into question their undoubted relationship with Divinity. Rather it is to warmly affirm them as faithful fellow servants of God and brothers and sisters on the same spiritual journey, leaving them unwounded by foolish and arrogant claims that we alone have ‘the truth’, and that we alone are in divine relationship. Perhaps then we can get alongside our fellow ‘lovers of good and of God’ in genuine fellowship and with a new sort of radical humility. Shock-horror! Perhaps they may even have something to teach us, something to bless us with. Then just maybe, once they have seen the quality of our lives and looked deep into our hearts, we in turn may be able to share with them about our amazing Jesus and the Holy Spirit in order to more enrich and empower their existing relationship with God.
Acts 10.34-48 records Peter’s sermon, and the way the Holy Spirit takes over just before Peter gets to the really dumb part! Peter launches into his sermon to Cornelius’s household, and in doing so makes it very clear that despite the thrice-repeated vision and despite his earlier revelation, he is still entrenched in his exclusivist mind-set. Gathering steam, he explains who Jesus is then comes out with the statement that “everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name." Peter’s obvious implication is that those who have not made this declaration of belief, (and of course Cornelius and his household haven’t) have not received forgiveness of sin. At this point God, it seems, has had enough. Just as Peter is about to tell Cornelius that he has to accept Jesus in order to be saved, the Holy Spirit takes the initiative and shuts Peter up, right in mid-sentence. "While Peter was still speaking these words, [and just before the really dumb part] the Holy Spirit came on all those who heard the message."
As we know, the coming of the Holy Spirit in this Pentecost manner happened only to those already in a ‘saved’ relationship. It is therefore most reasonable to assume that this was not the moment of Cornelius’s salvation, but rather an expansion of a long and existing relationship with the God of the universe. An expansion of light and life rather than a first time entrance into eternal life.
Acts 11.1-18 records Peter’s report of the entire Cornelius episode to the apostles and ‘brothers’ in Jerusalem. News of Peter’s visit to Cornelius spreads rapidly through Judea. The notion that salvation could be open to the uncircumcised gentile is radical, and Peter is called to account in Jerusalem in front of a group which is still basically Jewish in outlook. How is he to adequately explain the vision or his visit to Cornelius’s home, when he doesn’t himself fully understand the implications? Surely, he reasons, it has to be that he was called to preach Jesus to the centurion’s household in order that they would be saved.
Acts 11.13-14 In Peter’s account he puts words into the mouth of the angel who spoke to Cornelius, words that the angel never said! Here we have a classic example of what happens when a person's entrenched religious traditions make it impossible for them to accept the full implications of the truth they have been so clearly given. Peter acts not so much from any dishonesty, but as a result of his complete inability to face up to the shattering implications of his own vision, the words he blurted out in 10.34 and indeed the whole disturbing Cornelius episode.
What he does as a result is to play 'God’s little helper' and to actually add what he feels sure the angel must have accidentally missed out saying and in fact should have said! In reality, only the first part of what Peter says the angel said is actually correct. In Acts 11.13 Peter relates the angel's message as, "Send to Joppa for Simon who is called Peter. (This part is correct.) He will bring you a message through which you and your household will be saved." (This part is incorrect!)
In Acts 10, what the angel says to Cornelius is spelt out in crystal clear language on two separate occasions, in verses 3-6 and verses 30-32. In neither of these accounts does the angel say what Peter claims he said. What the angel does say, according to the meticulous Luke, is, "Cornelius, God has heard your prayer and remembered your gifts to the poor. Send to Joppa for a man called Peter. He is a guest in the house of Simon the tanner, who lives by the sea." Note, there is absolutely no mention at all of Peter’s claim that Cornelius is also to hear a message by which he and his household will be saved.
Some evangelical scholars have tried to claim that this part was simply missed out of the earlier statements in Acts 10. Yet such a claim makes no sense at all. Luke clearly knew what Peter claimed had been said by the angel, so if his other eye witnesses had corroborated this he would, without doubt, have included it. Doing so would certainly have protected Peter from any suggestion that he could have been embellishing the truth. Remember, Luke had two occasions on which to include this and thus correct any oversight, if in fact he had reason to believe that all of Peter’s Acts 11.13 statement was correct. The only possible conclusion is that, honest historian that he was, Luke was not prepared to massage the text and insert something that clearly the angel did not say, even to save Peter’s reputation!
Why did Peter and the Jewish Jesus-followers fail to grasp the full implications of Peter’s astounding vision?
Like the evangelical Church of today, like today's fundamentalist Muslims, Jews, Hindus, and many others, the Jews of Christ's time had undergone centuries of exclusivist doctrinal brain washing. For hundreds of years they had endlessly told themselves that being 'chosen by God' meant that they and they alone had the only acceptable way to God. This dogma was part of the very warp and woof of the Jewish psyche. It confirmed to them that the gentiles were eternally outside the covenant of God's love. And as with all such excluding dogmas, it was an endless source of rich protein that fed their spiritual pride. At best this nourished their sense of racial and religious superiority, at worst it led to them to despise all gentiles. Like the evangelical Church, they could appeal to many carefully selected Bible verses to make their views appear, to them at least, as being 'what the Bible teaches'. And like the evangelical Church they scrupulously ignored or shallowly explained away those awkward parts of their Bible that told a different story of God's generosity to those outside the covenant of Israel.
All the new Jewish converts did was to transfer their traditional ingrained exclusivism to themselves as followers of Jesus the Messiah, and to add all Jews who didn't accept Jesus to their list of those rejected by God. As for the gentiles, they simply didn't enter their consciousness. Apart from a few third-class gentile 'proselytes' converted to Judaism, no gentile could ever be accepted by God.
Bearing this is mind, we can begin to understand just how difficult it was for them to be confronted by and accept two radical possibilities:
1. That gentiles could now come to God through Christ, and
2. That in this new 'age of grace' with its, as they saw it, exclusive 'one way only ' to God, a hated Roman and a centurion at that, who did not even know about Jesus let alone 'believe in him', had been living in a thoroughly 'saved' relationship with God for likely many years!
In Acts 11.16-18 we see both Peter and the Jerusalem group struggling to make sense of God’s ‘new thing’. In this moment Peter is granted another revelation: “So if God gave them the same gift [that is, baptism by the Holy Spirit] as he gave us, who believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I to think I could oppose God?” The group would exclaim with great wonder, "So then, God has even granted the gentiles repentance unto life." And neither Peter, the Jerusalem group nor Christians down the ages would realise the full implications of the revelation, that God regards as clean and accepted into divine relationship not only those who ‘believe in the Lord Jesus Christ’ but all those “from every nation who fear him and do what is right.”
Paul’s Surprise (or is it Unwitting?) Confirmation that God Accepts People on the Basis of ‘Persistent Heart-based Goodness’ and the Keeping of the ‘Royal Law’: Romans 2.6 -16
If ever there was a prime example of Peter’s delightful understatement that some of Paul’s writings were ‘hard to understand’ it is the book of Romans, especially Paul’s declarations regarding the nature and broadness of salvation. For all Paul’s efforts to produce a water-tight logical salvation formula, he never does quite succeed in tying up all the theological loose ends into some safe iron-clad ‘God controlling’ definition. Despite his best attempts, he still manages to occasionally trip himself up and display the odd healthy bout of doctrinal schizophrenia. It is, after all, a hopeless task to begin with. What mere mortal will ever succeed in locking the Almighty into some formula which dictates to him whom he can and can’t show mercy to - a fact we evangelicals have been slow to learn.
This passage in Romans is just one of those revealing schizophrenic moments. In reading it one gains the impression that Paul might have well sat back later and said, "Oh dear, did I really write that?"
Despite his insistence later in Romans that salvation is ‘by faith alone’, Paul’s statement here sounds amazingly like those of Jesus in the synoptic passages we have been looking at so far. Fortunately this timeless truth, engrafted into the soul’s DNA of this one-time Pharisee, manages to burst through around the edges even in the midst of Paul’s attempt to argue something quite different. Let me quote Romans 2.6. "God will give to each person according to what he has done. [quoting Psalm 62.12.] To those who by persistence in doing good seek glory, honour and immortality, he will give eternal life. But for those who are self-seeking and who reject the truth and follow evil, there will be wrath and anger..... Glory, honour and peace for everyone who does good: first for the Jew then the Gentile. For God does not show favouritism."
WHY CHRIST CAME
What the Incarnation is All About
Prior to Christ, God communicated to mankind through nature, conscience, priest, prophet and in a variety of ways via the written word (and of course he still does). But at last, ‘when the time had fully come’, the God-man came with the express purpose of giving a human, understandable and above all compassionate face to the confusing and frightening versions of God and gods that fallible humans had conjured up over the preceding millennia.
Time had at best blurred and at worst tragically perverted the image of God, with often devastating social consequences. Even the Jews had over the centuries evolved an understanding of Yahweh that was increasingly distorted. They had surrounded God with myriads of burdensome rules and laws, claiming that this was what Yahweh wanted. It was partly Jesus’ relentless labelling of these laws as ‘traditions of men’ that so angered the Jewish establishment they finally had him crucified.
Thus the incarnation of the Christ was all about bringing a desperately needed clarity to the issue of what God was really like and how he really wanted people, both Jew and non-Jew alike, to relate to him.
Jesus Defines the Exact Reason for his Coming: Luke 4.16-20
(One of the most important statements he ever made.)
Full of the power of the Holy Spirit, Jesus strides out of the wilderness after forty days of fasting and confrontation with Satan. He heads for his home town of Nazareth and attends the normal synagogue Sabbath service, where he has been invited to do the final reading and commentary. On being handed the scroll of Isaiah, he ‘scrolls down’ to Isaiah 61 and then proceeds to seriously violate an accepted rule of synagogue reading. In the middle of a sentence (61.2) he stops reading, rolls up the scroll and returns it to the keeper of the scrolls, leaving the sentence and the reading unfinished.
This is what he had read: "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty for the captives and the recovery of sight for the blind, to release the prisoners, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour….." There he suddenly stops mid sentence! The reason is clear. If Jesus had continued reading his very next words would have been, "… and the day of vengeance of our God." But this was not what his coming was about. To have carried on reading would have been to distort for ever the central meaning of his coming. Jesus’ coming was all about the very best of news, not about God’s vengeance, nor about a ‘new’ more narrow way.
WHAT THE CROSS IS ALL ABOUT
The Great Paradox of the Cross; the Deep Magic of the Universe
It is impossible to understand the full nature and extent of Christ's atoning work on the cross unless one grasps the great paradox inherent in this event.
'A Paradoxical Event'
A paradoxical event is one which contains two seemingly opposing truths. Truths that cannot easily, if at all, be logically reconciled. Truths that, when explained on their own, sound completely true, but when put side by side seem to contradict each other. Truths that appear to cancel each other out to the extent that 'logic' would say that both of them cannot be right, you must choose one or the other. Yet your every instinct and deepest intuition tells you that, if you are to extract the fullest possible meaning from the event, both truths have to be grasped and held in tension, despite the fact that they seemingly contradict each other.
It is impossible to ever 'understand' who Christ is without accepting the power of paradox. How else can we grasp the contradiction of Christ’s being somehow both human and Divine, or fully human yet without sin. So it is a vain hope to imagine that we can comprehend the events of the crucifixion without encountering great paradox. To imagine that the meaning of the Cross is contained within some simple mono-layered truth is to fly in the face of everything we know about Christ in every other area of his life and mission.
Yet it is precisely this very mistake that the evangelical church has made in its doctrine of the Cross, and resulting doctrine of salvation. Evangelicals have interpreted Christ's atoning work as having no paradoxical meaning. Lacking any appreciation of its vast paradoxical nature, they have perceived the crucifixion to be simply a single layered event stuck in time and space. As a result they have seen only one side of the paradox while imagining they have the whole truth! They have then arrived at their doctrines by making logical deductions from this one part of the truth only. Inevitably, they have ended up seriously skewing key aspects of their doctrines - not least their understanding of the nature of the ‘good news’, the 'new covenant’ or the ‘Kingdom of God’ – and, as a result, the whole issue of the nature of and the broadness or otherwise of salvation.
What Part of the Paradox do Evangelicals Understand and Accept?
Evangelicals rightly understand the fact that, through a real man, in real time and at a real place, Christ's death and resurrection accomplished atonement for the sin of the world. They rightly declare that on the cross on that particular day in Palestine "God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself and not counting their sins against them."
What Part of the Paradox do Evangelicals Not Understand?
Evangelicals have failed to grasp the hugely important second strand of truth within the paradox - namely the fact that, on the cross, God was in Christ acting out in time and place on the stage of world history the great cosmic drama of grace. They fail to grasp that the Cross was God’s way of telling the world that this ‘way of amazing grace' by which men and women come to and are lovingly welcomed by him, is the way it has always been since the dawn of time and the way it will always be. They fail to grasp that the work on the Cross is a timeless eternal work, outside the limitations of our world of time.
It must be said here that some evangelicals will acknowledge this fact. But even when they do, they do not comprehend that if this is indeed true then it changes at a most profound level many of the doctrinal presuppositions of exclusivist evangelical salvation understandings.
I can remember, in my own sermons, saying on several occasions that Christ's work on the cross extended back in time, as God was outside our restriction of human time and space and saw the entire world from beginning to end in the light of Christ's work on the cross. This is, of course, at least part of what I am arguing for now. However, I at no point sat down and thought through its implications for doctrines such as the New Covenant, Good News, Kingdom of God and ‘the nature of salvation’. All I took from the insight was a vaguely understood and somewhat comforting explanation of how God could have forgiven sin in the Old Testament when no actual sacrifice of animals took place.
Let us now look in greater detail at the two great strands of truth contained within the paradox of the Cross, beginning with the timeless nature of grace.
The Two Great Paradoxes
1. Timeless Grace and the Divine Drama
Revelation 13.8: "… the lamb that was slain from the foundation of the world."
There never was a time in the history of human kind when the 'amazing grace' that was accomplished on the Cross in our world of time was not totally available. It is a fundamental error to imagine that only the period after the crucifixion is the ‘age of grace’ and that prior to this time people came to God on a different and inferior basis. This is the major mistake of the evangelical church, and it is largely because of this mistake that evangelicals hold their unfortunate exclusivist views of salvation.
The Cross was the Godhead’s unique ‘passion play’, a quintessential divine drama acted out on the stage of the time and space world of humankind. Its essential purpose was twofold.
Firstly, it was a thunderous demonstration and dramatisation of what always has been the deepest underlying bed-rock of this vast universe. Its ‘good news’ was that God loves the world and that he is, and always has been, reconciled to his creation. Amazing grace has always existed. The crucifixion was God’s masterpiece, designed to express this great truth in a way that would emblazon it on the psyche of humanity for eternity. This time God’s truth would not be expressed through instructions written in ink, through heady and wordy theological ideas, or through the rantings of some wild prophet. This was the divine ‘virtual drama’ like no other, set in real time. The main character was no mere actor playing out a role, but a real person, and the action involved his real flesh, his real blood and his real death. And later, thank God, his real resurrection.
The message that the Godhead was seeking to brand with blood and fire on the psyche and souls of humanity for ever was this:
• The need for physical sacrifice to atone for sin is forever over.
• There has never been a time in the history of the world when God has not faced human kind and his creation with the outstretched arms of amazing grace, love and welcome.There never has been a time when his back has been turned in anger. The Cross was about Divinity striding onto the stage of human history, ripping off the mask forged from centuries of human misconceptions and with indescribable power and passionate love, like some vast Divine Pavorotti with arms flung wide, in full voice, pouring out his love song to humanity, past, present and future.
• The price for our evil and self-rule has always been paid in full. Atonement has always been made.
• Long before God is ever our judge he is on our side. God does not wait with baited breath for our every sin and failure, in order to demand some physical offering to placate his wrath. No, a million times no. The message is, God loves you.
• The timeless Cross is about God saying to humanity, “See this is what I am really like, this is how I really regard you.”
The Cross did not change God’s attitude towards humankind. It didn’t need to. It was not about placating the anger of God in relation to humanity. It was about changing us, changing our perceptions of how God regards us and of how we live in right relationship with him.
The Cross was about showing that every person who lives in any degree of right relationship with God, whether Christian or pagan, Hindu or Muslim, agnostic or atheist (and whether they are conscious or completely unaware of this fact) does so through "the Lamb who was slain from the foundation of the world." Thus through his timeless work on the cross Jesus Christ is “the way, the truth and the life”, and no-one who is in relationship with God ultimately comes by any other way. All who on death find themselves in heaven will find that they are there only by virtue of the Cross - whether they had conscious knowledge of this or not.
When John, the writer of the book of Revelation, proclaimed that the Lamb (Christ) had been “slain from the foundation of the world” (Revelation 13.9), he was proclaiming a hugely significant truth, the real import of which not even he fully grasped. All revelatory utterances of necessity pour through humans shaped and restricted by blinkers and preconceptions. It is one thing to receive revelation, it is another thing to necessarily understand the full meaning of what we have just come out with.
Certainly it was a truth that was not picked up on by the evangelical church. What blinded them from grasping the vast implications of this liberating concept was their mistaken belief that the nature and basis of ‘new covenant’ salvation and forgiveness was fundamentally different from what it had been under the ‘old covenant’. But it wasn’t!
The idea that God’s forgiveness and grace was fully available before the cross and without the Jewish or any other sacrificial system, was not new. For centuries God had been softening up Israel for this final break with the need for external sacrifices. The Jewish Bible contains a surprising number of proclamations of forgiveness that do not seem to need any form of religious ritual or actual physical sacrifice, for example Isaiah 6.6-7. As early as 1,000 BCE David, in some decidedly heretical statements, had cast doubt on the need for external sacrifices and declared that what God was really interested in was the state of a person’s heart. (See Psalms 40.6-8, 51.16-17 and 103.10-14) Even when the sacrificial system was advocated, it was declared to be of use only when the person making the sacrifice had the right heart attitude. Without that, sacrifices were said to be an abomination to God.
So, right at the very core of the ‘old covenant’ was the bed-rock response to God of ‘right heart’. As we have already seen, when the Prophet Hanani had declared in 2 Chronicles 16.9, "The eyes of the Lord run to and fro across the whole earth (not just Israel) to show himself mighty…”, it was on behalf of those whose hearts - not their sacrifices and certainly not their doctrines! – were pure and ‘hard after’ him. It is precisely this bed-rock attitude that is the basis of the ‘new covenant’. Clearly, as far as deepest core responses go, there is no difference whatsoever between the old and new covenants regarding what constitutes the fundamental basis for divine relationship.
What the ‘New Covenant’ was All About
Christ’s coming, teaching and crucifixion was all about the clearing away of false human perceptions (both Jewish and gentile) over how a person could be forgiven and live in relationship with God.
The worldwide belief of the time said that sins could only be forgiven, and God or the gods propitiated, by means of some form of special physical sacrifice and ceremony, usually conducted by a priestly go-between. At its worst, this belief fed a universal delusion that religious ritual, correctly performed, had some special magic power which forgave a person’s sins even if they had no genuine sorrow or remorse for the evil they had perpetrated. For the Jews this had, for centuries, meant keeping meticulously to the yearly round of prescribed animal sacrifices and adhering to myriads of Jewish Torah rules and regulations, a practice which Jesus and Paul were to so rightly thunder against.
The ‘new covenant’ brought the previously subterranean bedrock of Gods grace, which had always been present in the ‘old covenant’, bursting upwards like a volcanic eruption into world of human consciousness. It was a new proclamation of the grace that had always existed. The ‘new covenant’ was God's grand restatement that he had always accepted people of 'good heart' into relationship with himself on the basis of his great love and graciousness, without the need for external sacrifice. It was God's dramatic way of saying, firstly to the Jews and then to the whole world, what he had been building up to for centuries through the psalmists and prophets - that physical sacrifice and the meticulous keeping of ritual and purity laws was not needed and could now be forever done away with. This is the new part of the 'new covenant'.
2. The Mystery of Atonement
2 Corinthians 5.19: "God was in Christ reconciling the world unto himself and not counting their sins against them."
The second part of the great paradox is this. While full and free grace and atonement has existed from the foundation of the world, in actual time and place Christ accomplished the vast mystery of atonement. This is perhaps less easy to grasp with the reason and logic of intellect (especially the intellect of western trained minds); it is best ‘known’ or intuited in the region of soul and spirit.
The mystery and paradox of the Cross is this. Not only was the Cross a dramatisation of the lamb that had been slain from the beginning of time and a demonstration of God’s eternal attitudes towards humankind. In our dimension of time and space Christ actually accomplished atonement!
He didn’t just play-act bearing the sin of the world. On the cross Christ actually did bear the unimaginable horror of the entire sin of the world, past present and future. Christ actually did accomplish atonement, he was that sacrificial ‘Lamb of God that takes away the sin of the world. And when he cried out, "It is finished," it was finished. The sacrificial lamb had been slain and complete and total atonement made. It was truly, as C.S. Lewis’s great Lion King Aslan was to declare, "the deep magic of the universe."
By Bruce Puddle
www.ists-spiritualschool.org
From section: Inclusive Christianity
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