“Are you saved?”
Did you ever hear that question growing up, perhaps within the cultural frame of evangelicalism?
The question, as it is phrased above, sounds dated. There are more current ways of asking and some new expressions of church make the question friendlier, but maintain the same theological posture. The question, of course, implies that the starting point, the assumed position of everybody, everywhere, is damnation, some terrible fate that requires rescue.
Maybe you heard it as, “When were you saved?”
When it is asked this way, it assumes another theological, religious interpretation. Namely, the idea that salvation is punctiliar. What that means, basically, is that salvation is something that happens in a moment. One moment you are damned, or at least not saved, and the next moment, you are saved.
This way of thinking of salvation draws many lines. Some are lines in time, some are lines between people, the saved and the un-saved. A red flag should be raised about any theological idea around salvation that says the saved are “US”. That is, if you ask someone who presents such clear lines around ideas of salvation who is saved and they reply with some form of “All of the people who believe just what I believe”, then there is a fairly decent chance that they are in the business of sales, at least as much as they might be in the work of faith.
My Christian faith matters to me. In fact, my Christian faith has been more influential than anything else in how I see myself, the world, other people, and the nature of time. If someone approached me and asked, “Are you saved?” I would say yes, but I would have some questions of my own to ask back.
Why have we so often ceded the conversation around salvation to the people who act as if they know for sure, without question, the nature of salvation, even to the point of knowing who is saved and who is not?
Will Willimon, well-known Christian leader, preacher, professor, has said that the best question is not “Are you saved?” but rather, “Who does the saving?” In other words, rigid, triumphalist, overly certain concepts of salvation often treat salvation as something that is attained, acquired by an act of the person who is saved. Thus, Jesus becomes a means to an end.
Willimon’s question “Who does the saving?” helps remind us that any Christian concept of salvation is more about Jesus than it is about us. Salvation, whatever its nature and scope, is “in Christ”.
Karl Barth, when asked “When were you saved?” famously replied by not answering directly. When pressed for a day, a month, a year, the only time he mentioned was when Jesus gave his life at Golgotha.
Hopeful Christian faith calls us to expansive, evocative consideration of salvation. The word often used for salvation in the New Testament means “healing” and it pertains to healing of the world, the cosmos, more than simply the rescue of an individual.
What does it mean that salvation is “in Christ”?
This is a question worth asking.
I was pondering the nature of salvation recently when reading the early part of a book by Hartmut Rosa called Social Acceleration. The book presents a sociological theory about how the speed of the world has impacted our sense of meaning and our understanding of humanity and the good life.
Early on, there is a note that I saw in relation to salvation.
In rigid religious understanding, salvation and eternal life were the purview of the church. Church leaders, whether ordained and robed or proudly non-ordained and evangelical, determined who was saved and who was not. Salvation, in other words, could be carried as a threat. You might live in fear that you are not saved in the estimation of those in charge.
Rosa’s writing points to the cultural promise of acceleration within secular understanding. As society moved away from rigid religious structures towards more secular understanding, what replaced the salvation offered by the church was a kind of salvation by way of experience. That is, many people now think that a fulfilled life is a “filled full life”.
“The more we accelerate our ability to go to different places, see new things, try new foods, embrace various forms of spirituality, learn new activities, share sensual pleasures with others, experience different forms of art - the closer we come to having a truly ‘fulfilled’ life.”
From the book, Social Acceleration
For what it’s worth, I feel a kind of hopelessness in both models of fulfilment and salvation, in the terror and dividing up view of fearful religious models, and in the gathering up of experiences pressure of recent life and culture.
I feel something very different than both of these in hopeful faith in Jesus. My faith in Jesus does not separate me from those who are “not saved” as if I am in and they are out. My faith instead moves me towards people as I see Jesus himself moving towards ALL of us in incarnation.
My faith in Jesus also frees me from the insistent call, the impossible demand that I will know fulfillment in life by experiencing as much as possible.
I move to prayer again;
Dear Jesus, grant me faith and wisdom to hear again your words;
“Come to me, all you who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest for your soul.”