- My mentioning "salvation as future" was almost a throw-away line in
last week's posting. The topic under discussion was Mark Heim's thesis
about different salvations offered in different religions. Buddhist
Nirvana is something else than the end-of-the-line that the Christian
Gospel offers. And then, as an aside, I remembered a Seminex NT colleague
who used to call our attention to Paul's use of "salvation" as a specific
term for the good news at the end of the line.
- Of course, Paul and other NT writers link it to the additional good
news metaphors [and the Lutheran confessors follow suit]--justification,
reconciliation, etc. in that laundry list above. But in terms of its
linguistic specificity it signals rescue from God's own critique, an
evaluation not complete until the last day, when God's final judgment
occurs. The beginning of the Gospel is what God is doing for us in Christ.
Salvation strictly speaking is a term for the good news at the end. In
Romans 5:9f it comes out like this: "Now that we have been justified by his
blood, we will be saved through him from the wrath of God. For if while we
were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son, much
more surely, having been reconciled, will we be saved by his life."
Note that the big terms, reconciliation as well as justification, are
already a done deal. But the grand finale is not yet. "Wrath of God" in
5:9 is Paul's term for that final exam, God's operation "in the final
analysis." The term wrath doesn't signal God's crankiness, but God's
final No to sinners. For sinners it is indeed punitive judgment, and
that's not good news. For sinners to survive that final settlement is Good
News indeed. Call it salvation. Christ is the grounds for any and all who
survive that exam, just as Christ is the grounds for all of those other
good news terms. He is the one who makes it all happen--from beginning to
end. But the end is not yet.
- When Paul finishes by saying "we will be saved by his life," he's
linking salvation to resurrection, first of all Christ's resurrection and
from that one ours as well. Salvation and our final resurrection get close
to being synonyms. Surviving the final settlement and finally overcoming
death--especially the "second" death--are two sides of the same coin. To
locate all of that in the future is not to minimize its present impact.
One of you said: "It is more of a comfort to my conscience to trust the
promise that in Christ I have passed the final exam than to hope I will."
Doesn't such sentiment downgrade the value of hope in the Good News? It
seems to me that "hope" in the NT is also a good-news word, if you will, a
"future-tense" noun. So "to hope that I will pass the final exam" is not
second-class comfort. It's first-class, state of the art. Christian hope
is faith-in-Christ focused on the future. It signals that what I'm
trusting as valid for me now will continue to be valid from here to the end
of the line--and even beyond. Hope for salvation is as solidly Gospel as
faith is for justification. But hope's focus is up ahead. The end of the
line is not yet. That's not necessarily a downer. It's just a fact.
- Back to the many NT metaphors for the benefits of Christ. Even though
they often get bunched together in Christian parlance, each has its
distinctive focus. Some even more than one. Reconciliation (in Rom. 5
above) is enemies becoming friends. [In 2 Corinthians 5 reconciliation
bears a second image, that of a commercial term, getting accounts to
balance.] Freedom is prisoners having their shackles broken. Adoption is
orphans getting parents. Forgiveness is folks getting their debts cleared
up. Peace is restoration of rightness in all relationships--with God, with
self, with others, with the world. Justification is sinners getting the
justice they deserve and still coming out alive from the court room--and
even more, from the gallows. Salvation strictly speaking is the good news
of Christ for the end of the line, when every nemesis, especially the "last
enemy," the last critique is nullified. Well then, what about all those NT
salvation references that seem so here and now?
- In its OT rootage salvation is a health/healing term. That gets
explicit in the NT healing that Jesus does, where we frequently hear his
closing words: "Your faith has saved you (or healed you.)" In all those
instances the Greek term is the same, "soozein." Why English translations
sometimes render it as "heal" and sometimes as "save" in these healing
stories, is not clear to me. But even so this side of the resurrection, no
one's healing is complete. Even Lazarus' resurrection in John's gospel
didn't render him death-proof. Full healing, final healing, is up ahead in
the final resurrection when our mortality itself is healed. If the pay-off
for sin is death, as God said, then trumping death is full healing, healing
in the final analysis. Call it salvation.
- What I should have done before launching on this excursus was to
consult the newly published authority par excellence for such matters:
Frederick W. Danker's "A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and
Other Early Christian Literature," 3rd edition, just off the press from
University of Chicago Press, 2000. [GO to your favorite book-seller to get
your own copy. $85 for 1108 double-columned pp.] All the more so should
I have done this since our condominium is but two floors away from Fred and
Lois Danker's dwelling in the same building here in St. Louis. Besides
that we have our own autographed copy.
Well, "Fred says" (p 986) in NT usage "salvation, with focus on
transcendent aspects . . . is found only in connection with Jesus Christ
as Savior. This salvation makes itself known and felt in the present, but
will be completely disclosed in the future." So it's already on the
scene, but not the whole ball of wax. The final exam is still outstanding
and comes under the rubric of salvation's "complete disclosure in the
future." Mindful of that full disclosure yet to come Paul tells the Romans
(13:11) in the old lectionary text for Advent I: "Salvation is nearer to
us now than when we first believed."
- One way Bob Bertram used to talk about this at Seminex was to note that
in the NT Gospels sinners were offered a chance to "scoop" God's final
judgment awaiting them at the end of the line. How? By trusting Jesus.
It goes something like this: Jesus comes as friend of sinners, and on the
cross gets treated as sinner par excellence. He gets the final "wages" due
to sinners: death and God-forsakenness all in one package. The synoptic
Gospels with their references to earthquake, eclipse, even corpses coming
out of the tombs on Good Friday, are signalling that some sort of judgment
day is happening here. It's a proleptic (ahead of time) apocalypse before
the final one.
Jesus undergoes judgment day in his body on the tree. But since (as even
the Roman centurion divined) "surely, this was God's son," for himself
Jesus is no candidate for judgment day. So he's enduring judgment day for
others, for "real" sinners, and doing it willingly. Throughout his
ministry he offers sinners the sweet swap: his judgment day in exchange for
our own. Faith in him makes the swap effective. In one sense
Christ-trusting sinners already have their own judgment day behind them and
they are already home free. But there is still a "final" judgment day up
ahead. Salvation still has one chapter to go. Christ-trusters have no
Angst as that day moves toward them. For that final judgment will only
ratify that their trust was indeed true. But it hasn't happened yet. So
Christ-trusters lift up their heads when any apocalyptic signals appear.
Fundamental to the faith is that salvation is nearer to us now than when we
first believed.