2) The traditional evangelical approach does to others what we Christians hate having done to us!

All my life I have faithfully endeavoured to win people to Christ. Time and again, especially after a sermon or training seminar on ‘how to witness’, I would go off to work all prayed up and bursting at the seams to ‘witness’ to my work colleagues, only to find that most were not interested. Those few who did have any interest in things spiritual became increasingly wary of me as they sensed my hunger to ‘convert’ them to my version of the only true way to God. I struggled with deep discouragement and felt grieved that I had, so to speak, ‘brought my witnessing harp to the party but no-one wanted me to play’. What made it worse was that I was a good communicator, able to provide what I felt were excellent answers to people’s objections and questions. But I was increasingly aware that no matter how careful and gracious I was or how nifty my answers seemed to be, I still managed to turn more people away from God than attract them to him.

Most times I told myself and other Christians that this reflected the ‘hardness of people’s hearts’. Yet I fully understood why people felt the way they did about Christians’ attempts to ‘convert’ them. I knew only too well that when I was on the receiving end of a ‘conversion’ attempt, be it by a Jehovah’s Witness, a Mormon or an Amway sales person, I not only felt defensive I was often deeply offended, especially when the Jehovah’s Witness or Mormon implied that because I wasn’t ‘one of them’ I didn’t, and in fact couldn’t, have a real relationship with God. They were, I believed, amazingly arrogant to imply that ‘they alone’ knew the way to God and that, to achieve salvation, I would have to sit at their feet, do exactly as they told me and accept that their interpretation of the Bible was the only correct one. I saw their steadfast refusal to admit even the possibility of my being in a relationship with God which fell outside their rigidly prescribed boundaries as a deliberate attempt to invalidate my personal integrity, my intelligence and my ability to enter into divine relationship.

This, I knew, was exactly how non-Christians felt when we treated them in like manner.

It was clear that our claims to be the only ones able to be in any sort of a relationship with God, and the resulting ‘energy of judgement’ which exuded so palpably from us, drove away the very people with whom we wanted to share the wonders of Christ. Without doubt we turned far more people away from seeking after God than we ever turned towards God. Yet there seemed to be no other way. Wasn’t it true that the New Testament teaches that God regards only us Christians as being in any sort of relationship with himself? And wasn’t it a fact that people do have to sit at our feet and accept everything we tell them or God will judge them and send them off to hell?

I suggest that this dilemma is one that most Christians struggle with. I also suspect that, unable to deal with the frightening implications of the questions it raises, more often than not they stifle it as quickly as possible.

3) The exclusivist salvation model is like a light switch without any dimmer capability.

Evangelical Christians regard as ‘saved’ only those who have accepted the full salvation package of a conscious ‘faith in Christ’. Unless individuals stand in the full light of the revelation of Jesus Christ they are said to be ‘in darkness’ and therefore outside the covenant of God’s saving grace. The light is either fully on or not on at all. In this salvation model God’s saving grace never extends to those who, despite not consciously ‘believing in Christ’, are nevertheless in some degree of spiritual light, as the synoptic Jesus would define that.

As has been pointed out in other articles on this website, such a model is based on seriously flawed assumptions. It fails to take into account all the biblical evidence and studiously ignores many key Bible passages which show that God and his Christ have a far more generous interpretation of what it takes to live in valid divine relationship.

I fully recognise that there are people who, by virtue of the unmistakable ‘bad fruit’ that their lives consistently produce, clearly do ‘live in darkness’. For such people the traditional evangelical salvation approach may be the only way to powerfully confront them with their sin and selfishness and shock them into the bright light of Christ. However, our error as evangelicals has been to automatically assume that everyone who is not a committed Christian lives in this sort of darkness and is therefore a ‘lost soul’. Unable to recognise the telltale signs of divine life within them, we approach them as if they don’t know anything of God already. In doing so we come across to them in ways that they cannot fail to register as both condescending and judgmental and, accordingly, our attempts to ‘save’ them more often than not go down like the proverbial lead balloon.

However, I believe that there is another way of understanding these people’s relationship with God which far more accurately describes where they are. I call this the ‘dimmer light switch model’, and I maintain that this model is far closer to what Jesus taught, when all of his statements are taken into account.

The ‘dimmer light switch model’

This view asserts that God is in real or ‘saving’ relationship with many people who, while not having a conscious commitment to Jesus Christ, nevertheless exhibit the good fruit of a life soundly based on the golden rule (Matthew 7. 14-23 and Luke 10.26ff). While such people may not live in the bright light that a conscious knowledge of Christ can (potentially at least) bring, the light is nevertheless on, and even in this ‘dimmer’ zone their lives are lived ‘under grace’.

Before we become too condescending and complacent, it must be clearly noted that there is strong biblical evidence to suggest that some of these people may be living lives which are far brighter and closer to God than some Christians. Jesus gives an illustration of just such a person in his famous story of the ‘good Samaritan’. Here he describes a man who, by virtue of being a Samaritan, would have undoubtedly had inadequate doctrinal understandings and no belief in or commitment to himself. Yet Jesus makes him a shining example of the sort of person who lived by the great commandment and was therefore counted as having eternal life. The vast scandal for his Jewish listeners lies in the fact that Jesus deliberately makes it clear that while this hated Samaritan heretic has eternal life the doctrinally correct Jewish clergy in the story clearly do not! (Luke 10. 25-37)