Salvation

Generation after generation, many Christians, no matter what their confessions, have been taught and have based their faith and piety on a one-dimensional, personalistic understanding of salvation. Church leaders and theologians, for centuries, have encumbered that core element of the Good News with all manner of rules and prerequisites, religious hoops to jump through, in order to attain the blessed assurance of personal salvation.  The result has been an endless parade of doctrinal wars, persecutions, and painful divisions in the Body of Christ. The history of such controversies, schisms, and conflicts has had devastating consequences for the Christian faith and for humankind. The doctrine of salvation is not the only issue to have been argued angrily through the decades: there have been numbers of contentious issues, and all have caused their share of conflict and grief. But the disputes over salvation have a role in many of those. Churches of all sorts have done a multitude of wise, loving, and commendable ministries through those centuries, of course. But even a cursory review of the conflict and carnage caused by this long saga of presumed divine superiority, and the condemnations and battles that have been its result, causes us to question whether Christianity is a blessing or a curse. Of course, it is both, and the same can be said of other religions as well, a reality that is perplexingly evident in our world every day. We need to acknowledge the curse and magnify the blessing. Any comprehensive reading of the scriptures leads to a much broader and more varied understanding of salvation. It is a compelling biblical saga of God's creation of the earth and humankind, our fall from God's gracious bounty, and the long story of God's redemptive activity, fulfilled for Christians in the life of Jesus of Nazareth and the new reality he proclaimed. We can reclaim the fullness of that message, a critical core of the Christian faith, when we embrace and tell the whole story. This is also an attempt to provide an alternative understanding of salvation that can nudge Christians toward a more authentic vision of God's love and purpose, and to enliven our hope for a future of greater unity in God's whole human family. I think of it as an antitoxin.

I have been a parish pastor for twenty years and engaged in denominational, ecumenical, interfaith and educational ministries for an additional thirty. The following reflections are a product of that fairly broad but very limited experience. I have understood my vocation as being, in part, to share the core elements of our faith and to connect the dots through their development in the long history of the Church: why have we, and why do we now believe this? This book is a pastoral overview of the major events and key factors that have led to our current painful reality, and it offers some hints at a way forward.