In his answer to the lawyer, Jesus in this one statement dropped an ‘atomic bomb’ into the midst of hundreds of years of accumulated ecclesiastical baggage and cut to the heart of what the Great Commandment taught – a simple yet radically costly way of living in right relationship with God and one another that seemed to need no Torah, no priesthood, no temple and seemingly no sacrificial system either.

As if this wasn’t enough, his ensuing story about the ‘good Samaritan’ would have hit like atomic explosion number two. It could not have failed to scandalise the Jewish establishment at least as much as his initial comment. In this famous story Jesus makes his hero a man from the despised Samaritan sect. The Jews regarded Samaritans as too heretical to have any relationship with God. They were, in Jewish minds, undoubtedly under divine wrath. Yet Jesus, by the clearest possible inference, makes it abundantly plain that the Samaritan in his story, heretic though he might be according to correct Jewish doctrine, was nevertheless living in a state of ‘eternal life’, in evangelical terminology a ‘saved soul’.

Clearly, and this is important, Jesus did believe that the Samaritans held significantly mistaken ideas. His remarks to the Samaritan woman he met at the well point to this (see John 4.22). Yet Jesus did not see false doctrine as any barrier to her establishing a real relationship with God. While he mentions to her some of the Samaritans’ wrong understandings, he in no way makes their correction a prerequisite of her coming to God in a fuller way. In fact, her incorrect doctrine appears to have been a complete non-issue with Jesus as far as ‘getting it 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 Christianity’s salvation formulas say one ‘gets saved’. Quite simply, 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. In fact, to an evangelical the very thought of saying that ‘eternal life’ can result from responses that require no belief in and commitment to Jesus Christ could only be seen as rank heresy! Yet here and in several other places in the synoptic gospels Jesus puts no ‘believe in me’ clause into the requirements for eternal life.

This starkly illustrates the fact that, in at least as far as Christ’s synoptic salvation teachings go, the evangelical church propagates a view of salvation quite different from the most early and reliable recorded teachings of their founder.
How did this come about?

The very short answer is that over the centuries this, the greatest of all the commands of God, has been seen as too Jewish and quietly forgotten. It has been replaced by an insistence on correct Christology and an absolute need for a person to knowingly ‘accept and believe in Jesus’. Ironically, it is no longer good enough even for a person to believe in God and seek to do his will. If that person doesn’t also dot the i’s and cross the t’s of correct understanding of who Christ is and his work on the cross, then we deem them to be a ‘still unsaved soul’.

While undoubtedly this view has been the orthodox interpretation of salvation since the time of the Apostles Peter and Paul, it is clearly not what Jesus taught as recorded in the earliest extant and most reliable records of his life and teaching, namely the synoptic gospels Mark, Matthew and Luke. Rather, it results from the Church’s virtual ignoring of the synoptic salvation teachings, and its formulation of a salvation theology based exclusively on the very different ideas expressed by Paul and the much later writings of John.

It is time we in the evangelical church opened our synoptic gospels again and allowed them to become for the first time the source and touchstone of a new view of ‘living in Divine relationship’ – a view that will more accurately reflect what Jesus the Christ actually taught.

Another thought provoker

Christianity shows forth the Kingdom of God and the ‘good news’ in its most pure, powerful and effective form when it acts in the world with the practical love and compassion of Jesus Christ, and free of hidden agendas based, to a large degree, on conversion to Christianity of the recipients of those good deeds.

Strange though it may seem, the ‘no hidden agenda’ model is ultimately more powerful in drawing people to ask about the God who inspires such selfless giving than the model which uses ‘good works’ as a thinly veiled front for overt evangelism. While those responding may be fewer in number, the survival rate and genuineness of commitment of those who, inspired by the selfless agendaless model, find the way of Christ is likely to be much higher.

The more that works of compassion are simply a bait to cover the fish hook and real motive of conversion to Christianity, the more polluted, powerless and ineffective the actions become. The light which should have shone brightly into the world will have become veiled and dim.