The Problem With Getting “Saved”
An excerpt from “Christianity Beyond Belief”, by Todd Hunter
Every seat in the arena was full, the place was buzzing with anticipation. The crowd had experienced a full night of music. They heard a message designed to convince them that they were sinners in the eyes of God. The preacher explained the importance of having our sins forgiven so that we would be accepted by God into heaven. Testimonials were presented about the effects of “inviting Jesus into your heart.” Everyone knew the crucial moment had come as the evangelist neared the big emotional crescendo of his sermon and the altar call: “Is your eternal destiny secure? If you walked out of here tonight and got ran over by a truck and killed, do you know where you would go? Would you go to heaven or hell?”
I’m not picking on anybody with this stereotypical sound bite. I’ve said words to that effect hundreds of times in my life. I bring it up to help us start thinking about the nature of Christian life. It seems to me that many Christians have been imagining the wrong story concerning God and his people, and thus they come up with less-than-helpful ways of thinking about the Christians life.
The story these sound bites lead to is one in which the forgiveness of sin is the sole plot line. The plot line moves toward the final resolution of “who goes to heaven and who goes to hell.” Those bumper-sticker bits of theology say that the only essential thing happening between God and humans is mere forgiveness. Let’s stop and think about these simple and common ways of explaining Christianity.
Here is the first problem: That story very rarely produces actual followers of Jesus. At best it produces “fogiven people”–and even then I think forgiveness is only understood in a very shallow way. I believe that in responding to Jesus, people do not merely receive forgiveness of sins so they can go to heaven. Rather, they are forgiven so they can begin a different kind of life, a cooperative relationship with God, a new and eternal kind of life right now (which ultimately includes heaven).
But if the gospel and eternal life have to do with our life on earth, maybe we have misunderstood even basic terms like sin. Perhaps the issue in the Garden of Eden was not sin as we usually think about it–sex, alcohol, drugs or forbidden fruit, and popular media’s exploitation of them. I think the issue may have been more about sin as rebellion; at issue is a decision to take the first step on a path away from God–to try to become our own god. To sin is biblical terms means “to miss the mark” (God’s bulls-eye), “to go your own way,” “to take the wrong road.” “defiance of (God’s) intention,” “to stray from the correct path.” It means to ignore or fight against Gods’ story and his intention for us.
Those definitions alert us that there is a lot more going on in God’s story than just forgiving or punishing sins. God really wants us to become his cooperative friends and co-laborers–working with God in the routines of our new life. Far from trying to make forgiveness less important in the Christian story, my aim is to show that understanding sin in the context of God’s story is crucial to forming a new life, a cooperative friendship with God. I want us to see forgiveness as a starting line, a threshold to a new, fully human life. In my experience, forgiveness is often viewed as a finishing line, with a “whew” and a wipe of the brow while thinking I’m in. But I want ot emphasize that it gets us into a new life story, not merely into heaven when we die.
The new life story God is writing for us is this: He intends to have a people on earth who happily, easily and routinely embody, announce, and demonstrate the rule and reign of his kingdom. Failing to value this overarching story, this wider context, is what betrays most of our thinking about what it means to be a Christian.
-page 25-27. Posted with permission from Todd Hunter
January 5th, 2010 · 4 Comments
Categories: DE Thoughts
Rebecca said
am January 8 2010 @ 1:30 pm
Thought-provoking; thank you!
Gretchen Carlson said
am January 15 2010 @ 10:01 pm
Yes! I need to read this book. Forgiveness is the beginning of a new life – transformation – following Jesus.
We all know of people who have said a prayer, walked forward for an altar call (or whatever) but whose lives haven’t changed or shown any fruit of the Holy Spirit. And in these cases we quietly question the person’s salvation because we wonder if the person was only doing something to ensure their salvation, rather than truly embrace (and follow) Jesus as Savior.
I want to nudge people to Jesus and encourage them to embrace and follow Him fully in this life. Do you think people need to “nail” down their decision to follow/accept Jesus? (which usually ends up being a prayer, walking the aisle or something) The idea of having a specific “turning point” seems important for most alcohol and drug addiction groups; they want members to be able to state when they made a decision.
Randy Siever said
am January 17 2010 @ 3:03 pm
Gretchen,
I love your question regarding whether we need a specific “turning point” when it comes to a decision to follow Jesus. This is a really important and sticky question, and your reference to the AA model is a really good one I hadn’t thought of before.
A couple of thoughts (and I’m thinking about this all the time, so my thoughts are constantly in the state of transition). One is that if it is true that every person who comes to faith in Christ makes a decision to do so, then it must necessarily be a conscious decision. I suppose we do make unconscious decisions about things, and perhaps this could be done in regards to a decision to surrender your life and destiny to the leadership and authority of Christ. But I suspect that this kind of unconscious decision would have to take time to work itself out so that it would become part of our conscious reality, at least enough to where we would probably self-identify as a Christian.
And this is, statistically, what 86% of Christians actually end up doing. They do not have a “turning point” nailed down. Their conversion took months and even years to become part of their conscious reality and awareness. They cannot identify a date when this happened.
The minority of self-identified Christians (14%) report a conversion that was like a turning point, a single moment in time when they stepped from darkness into light. This is similar to the Apostle Paul’s experience. Most of these people (and I am one of them) tend to be very evangelistic, and most of our current evangelism models were developed by people like us. We think everyone must have OUR experience of conversion or it’s just too darn fuzzy to count. EVERY form of evangelism we have taught over the past 100 years or so simply ASSUMES this moment in time conversion experience is the “norm”. It is not.
It IS the norm for AA, however. People in AA do not stop drinking gradually. They stop suddenly and count the days from that point forward. I suspect this model depends on STOPPING something, rather than starting something (sobriety starts, but only as a result of stopping drinking). And I’d point out that some people (probably a small minority) who are alcoholics do stop drinking slowly, and some never stop completely but they reduce enough to recover their lives. This is a very small percentage, though.
Keep talking…this is really interesting and important stuff.
Gretchen Carlson said
am January 17 2010 @ 9:11 pm
Randy,
Thanks for your thoughts. All I know is that the more I read and converse about evangelism and conversion, the more questions I have! (It felt easier when I had all the answers with black and white thinking.) I so appreciate your thoughts and these conversations. Gretchen