Salvation: A Brief, Preliminary, and Inadequate Proposal

Here’s a bare bones outline of a thought experiment I’ve been playing with concerning salvation, damnation, eternal destiny, universalism, and the like. It’s only bare bones, the main lines of a view that would require much other demonstration and detail. So keep that in mind as you read it.

God created our world and us in it to share his life with us here. That’s the big picture within which we live our lives. God wants to be with us, ultimately as one of us (Jesus the incarnate one). This was not instantaneous. We needed to grow into or lives as free, responsible, and response-able creatures to whom God delegated the vocation of protecting, caring for, and nurturing the creation to its full flourishing.

Now God is both willing and able to achieve his purposes. We call that divine sovereignty. God gets what he wants. He’s set up the whole process and equipped us with everything we need to succeed. There’s no reason for failure.

Yet we do fail! Unfathomably, inexplicably, irrationally, unjustifiably, we try to be gods ourselves and everything, well, goes to hell. So now we’re in a mess! One we can’t get out of. Yet we know God will succeed in having the world and people he created as he intended to have us and it. So the beginning is set up by God and the end is guaranteed by God. The part we are to play, what we can change and effect, where our agency is intended to operate, is between the beginning and the end. That is where, post-sin, salvation becomes operative. It does not have to do with how God set things up or how he will bring it to pass. It has to do with how we play our roles in between the beginning and the end.

God starts with Abraham and Sarah in his saving work. Through this family God intends to spread his blessings that the world already turned down to it anyway. He won’t impose it on them or violate their free and responsible agency. But he will woo them with the invincible vulnerability of his love. The world may accept or reject God’s overtures through Israel or any other ways he reaches out to it. As he goes about this work of reclaiming and restoring humanity to his intended vocation for it, some will oppose, resist, and seek to derail or destroy it. God will bring such persons into judgment, eternal judgment in the sense that if they persist in their resistance or die in it they will have missed the life God intended for them. They will have failed to participate in the vocation and live out the image in which God created them. This will be an eternal loss because there is no do-over for such people. Even God cannot make up that loss for them. This is what is at stake in human life: will we or will we not share in God’s reclaiming and restoring of his creation, first as grateful recipients, and then as agents. Salvation is our participation in this work of God. Damnation is our refusal to participate in it.

Even this participation, this salvation, is not up to us. Ultimately God’s reclamation and restoration project entails God himself coming among us as one of us as Jesus of Nazareth to live in utter faithfulness and loyal love to his Father and for his purposes, something none of the rest of humanity was willing or able to do. In this Jesus all of us are reclaimed and restored for the good end God intends for us. We don’t deserve it, any of us. But it is given us anyway as a sheer gift. Even those who have lived and died before and after Jesus are included. Even those who damned themselves by failing to receive and participate in this redeeming work through Israel or, after Jesus, the church are forgiven and welcomed home.

Nobody gets away with anything here! God does not overlook or deny anything we do wrong. He forgives it. At unfathomable cost to himself. Some how in the death and resurrection of Jesus all things have been set right. We have been judged, damned, and redeemed – and that’s the story of salvation. As humanity welcomed home in Jesus we will all participate in the new creation just as God intended at the origin of creation. So universalism is true. But so also is judgment and damnation.

Universalism in the divine intent in creation and the divine result in the new creation. Judgment and damnation are the stakes for us in our living out of the life God has given us here. We participate and share in God’s work or we either remain indifferent or hostile to it. The former way leads to life; the latter to judgment and damnation. And the loss of the latter is, as we saw, real, painful, and eternal. Such folk will be welcomed in the new creation for Jesus’ sake as all of us will. But they have missed out on precisely what God created them for – and that can never be reclaimed!

Well, there’s an effort at rethinking this whole salvation thing. It’s much too brief to be convincing, I know. It’s just a thinking out loud piece. I’m not prepared to go to the cross for it. It might well be too far off track to be of much value. But I can’t quite lay aside as a dead end and keep playing with it. Let me know if you find any value, or deadly holes, in it.