“Redemption”
How about I get a song in your head to start this edition of Evangelical Word of the Week?
“Therefore the redeemed of the Lord, shall return, and come with singing unto Zion, and everlasting love shall be upon their heads …” (if you know it, you can keep singing it)
“Redeemed, Redemption” to keep it basic, meant, in the evangelical church, that you were bad, but that God, by your declaration of faith and your intense devotion, could make you good. You could be redeemed.
The word is better than that. When you find something redemptive, when you describe a great movie or book as a redemption story, you realize that, somehow, redemption works to bring us to the best of our humanity, even if we have caused hurt or loss. It is a beautiful word.
Yesterday, my morning scripture reading (yes, I do that) included the 130th Psalm. There is a great term in the translation that I was reading. It says, “With the Lord there is plentiful redemption.” Some translations use the words “full redemption”. Plentiful sounds better.
For those familiar with or raised within evangelicalism I suggest a consideration. In your church, was redemption actually plentiful? How was it plentiful? What was decidedly un-plentiful about it?
It might be that if redemption was thought of as being plentiful, it was only plentiful in particular ways. Perhaps, it was plentiful in regard to personal salvation, like you are fully saved, though even that was scarce in many evangelical churches. There was always the need to re-commit. You could never quite be sure. Redemption was certainly not plentiful in regard to other people, indeed not plentiful at all when it comes to most people who have ever lived.
There are very many people who have walked away from evangelicalism because the way redemption was actually thought of was, un-plentiful redemption / plentiful damnation.
Hopeful Christian theology exists to say that redemption is indeed plentiful. For the “good news” to be truly good, it must be good for those who believe and for those who do not. One place to start is to realize that redemption is part of God’s very character. To turn God into a force that effectively rescues relatively few people from eternal and ongoing terror is to turn God into a god with whom there is very much NOT plentiful redemption. It might be more accurate, in such ways of thinking to say, “with the Lord there is plentiful damnation.”
I read a quote recently from someone who has been a Christian for years and is currently wrestling with moving away from rigid interpretations of the Bible from their upbringing. The way that scripture had been taught to them placed importance on calling out “sin” pertaining to contemporary social issues and being very careful about including people who should be excluded. The person said that as they think about a faith that is more inclusive and more loving they wonder if they are disappointing God, they wonder if God will be upset at them.
Questions like this are honest, insightful and heartbreaking. They are heartbreaking because they show that there are people within evangelical traditions who have been taught that redemption is not plentiful at all, and that thinking so is dangerous or even upsetting to God. If the choice is between loving more and leaving the religious tradition with which you are familiar, or loving less and staying in, it is no wonder that so many people are walking away. The motivation for such leaving is not laziness or sin or self-centredness, but rather love.
Redemption is always more, always better, and always further than we can imagine. If there are voices that have sought to tell you that it is always less and always scarce, perhaps those are not the healthiest voices to allow yourself to consistently hear.
The accusation made in evangelical circles about believing in redemption in such ways is that it is universalist (everyone gets to heaven in the end). My suggestion is to refuse to enter such an argument.
I often tell people who wonder about our organization and its values: “We are not universalists, but we welcome the accusation.” The reason I am not a universalist is because universalism seems to me to be deciding something that I don’t get to decide, something better left to God.
What I am willing to say is that redemption, in hopeful Christian theology, redemption as I see it in Jesus Christ and in the scriptures, truly is plentiful. It’s always more and better, not less and scarce.
With God, there is plentiful redemption.
(Plentiful) Redemption
This week at Dinner Church we moved from confession to redemption, so this was super timely for my own thinking on the matter of redemption. I think A LOT about Julian of Norwich's showings, and the saying that everyone likes to quote, because it is beautiful, but that comes from this idea that we don't know God's grace-full-ness in this earthly life. And maybe there is something beyond what we can see, taste, feel, hear, smell, beyond even the passing of time that has a holy redemption beyond our imaginations. Every time I flip through Showings, I am renewed with hope, reconciled to God, and knowledge of his redeeming love.
"But Jesus, who in this vision had informed me of all that I needed, answered with these words, saying:
'Sin is necessary, but all shall be well.
All shall be well; and all manner of thing shall be well.'
And she goes long and hard into what sin is - and questions why if God created the earth with all this love, was sin ever introduced. And yet, throughout the showings (visions) she keeps returning to this love beyond comprehension that protects us from being overcome. Mystery and Hope. Redemption and Light. Love and Faith.
Thank you for sharing.
For the “good news” to be truly good, it must be good for those who believe and for those who do not. GOOD WORD.