Ed Stetzer is provoking (in a good way) a syncroblog discussion on the theological issues of Missional church. I appreciate that. I think it’s needed. Today’s question on his blog relates to the question of salvation. How does Missional church deal with the idea of salvation.
Ed argues that the idea of salvation in Christ took a turn in the Enlightenment. He says:
“The response of church and mission to the challenge of modernism was generally twofold among Protestants. The first response was simply to disregard the challenges of the Enlightenment and carry on as if nothing had changed. The second response took the challenges of modernism more seriously, to the point of a fairly uncritical accommodation. Instead of maintaining Jesus as God-incarnate who fulfills all righteousness and satisfies divine wrath on behalf of sinners, in modernist Protestantism he became the ideal human being to imitate, the moral exemplar. The person and work of Jesus was no longer at the center of mission, but rather the example and cause of Jesus took stage. The teaching supplanted the Teacher; the kingdom of God obscured the King.”
There are parts of this statement I agree with. The characterization of how protestant mainline Christianity (as it later became described) has some merit to it. Yet we must not ignore the part of the protestant wing that carried forensic atonement to new individualistic heights primarily under the influence of the Enlightenment. I don’t think either Luther or Calvin imagined what modernity would eventually do in isolating and reducing the atonement to a forensic transaction between each individual and God. This view of salvation became fully flowered in American revivalistic evangelicalism. This view of salvation, I would argue, has done as much damage to the furtherance of Mission in the world as the protestant mainline development. Do you agree? So I see Ed’s point, and I agree that the Missio Dei as it became used by the Ecumenical mainliner councils erred in this way. Today, as a result of both developments, we are left with a monstrous problem of a over hyped, individualized salvation that takes the shape of either people individually promoting a Kingdom enlightenment agenda for justice (de void of the actual power of God’s reign manifest in Jesus as Lord), or people promoting a version of a ticket out of hell for individuals. To me this is now almost old news and now we need to explore where God is leading us theologically and in practice. This is one the strengths of the Missional movement as led by leaders such as Ed Stetzer.
So Ed asks the question:
So what is your understanding of salvation and how it is mediated? Do you agree that missiology is closely connected soteriology– that one’s take on the “reach” of salvation determines the range of one’s missionary enterprise? Do you have any concerns that within the missional conversation some emphasize the example of Jesus over the salvific work of Jesus? Or that the vertical dimension of the God incarnate, Jesus Christ, saving men and women unto Himself is under-emphasized by some and rather a horizontal “conversion” towards one another is the primary focus?
To these questions I reply that salvation – to paraphrase N T Wright – is the working of God in the world to make all things right. In Jesus Christ, God is fulfilling his promise to the world – in the covenant of Israel – to make all things right. This is the work God has begun in Jesus Christ, of reconciling the whole world to Himself (2 Cor 5:17-22). This salvation is inextricable from the sacrificial atonement in Christ to bring us into a justified relationship with God thru Jesus Christ. But this new relationship with God is inextrricable from the horizontal reconciliation God is working every where in the world. The personal and social are so inseparable that to even talk as if they are two (like I just did) is to do violence to God’s work. We move therefore from asking people “have you made a decision to accept Christ as your personal Lord and savior?” to inviting others to join us in entering the salvation begun in Jesus Christ that God is working for the sake of the whole world. This to me is what it looks like to be saved witjin the Mission of God. This includes, and cannot be brought to fruition, apart from a conversion to the dying with Christ and resurrection with Him into the new life with Christ. I think theologians like N T Wright, Michael Gorman and even John Milbank help us see how this salvation has been birthed in a people through Christ’s life, sacrificial atonement and resuurection and his ascension to the right hand. They show how His Kingdom has been inaugurated in His rule, and that we can enter it now and by so doing invite the world into it. This births a peoiple, in communities, to live and witness to this life engaging the world in the New Kingdom life God is doing. (this is how this salvation is mediated).
I don’t want to be labor this post (I’m finishing up an entire book reframing the evangelcial doctrines and practice for participation in God’s mission). There is much more that could be said. But this approach I believe avoids the problems Ed talks about.
Does anyone else want to fill this out? Push back? Answer more of Ed’s questions in this regard? Chime in please.
This discussion will continue this week on the blogs below as well as Ed’s. I invite you to follow along! and chime in! and thanks Ed Stetzer for provoking this discussion.
Rick Meigs: The Blind Beggar
Bill Kinnon: kinnon.tv
Brother Maynard: Subversive Influence
Tiffany Smith: Missional Mayhem
Jared Wilson: The Gospel-Driven Church
Jonathan Dodson: Creation Project
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Your post reminds me of a book by John Driver, Understanding the Atonement for the Mission of the Church. In it, Driver examines the breadth of imagery for the atonement in the New Testament. He argues that the plethora of images is essential to fund a concept of salvation that is consistent with the depth and breadth of the NT testament. He examines the way that the mission of the church is undermined when a single image (or theory) displaces all others as the “biblical” explanation of the atonement.
One of the consistent problems I see in this whole debate is how the salvific import of Jesus’ example gets sidelined. Notice the dichotomy Stetzer makes – either we emphasize “the example” or the “salvific work” of Jesus. So Jesus’ salvific work can be reduced to forgiveness / justification / reconciliation, with the way Jesus actually lived is something other than saving. I think this right here pulls back the curtain on a less-than-fully-biblical view of what salvation means, and I think this is the point many of us are trying to make in re-establishing Jesus’ actual life as part of his salvific work. If we assume that salvation is liberation from the powers of sin and death, then salvation cannot be separated from our actual lives – what we do in and with them, etc. And it is here that Jesus’ “example” saves us, by showing us how to walk the way of salvation.
Here it also becomes clear that “example” is really not the right word for what we’re trying to say (and maybe using it is part of what continues to obstruct the larger re-definition of what salvation and being saved are all about). Really we’re talking about Jesus as our path-clearer or trailblazer. To walk in his steps quite simply is to experience salvation; it is at least part of what being saved actually is, not a second step to be brought in after salvation.
(Of course the whole “saved, being saved, will be saved” thing gets at this, but it hasn’t seemed to seep down into how we think about the holistic salvific impact of not only the death of Jesus, but also his incarnation/life. Clearly we could learn lots about this from our Eastern brothers and sisters).
Okay, this comment is too long. Sorry!
Okay, just a little more…
This is in no way meant to marginalize what Stetzer means by Jesus’ salvific work – not at all! I don’t want a one-sided coin either. It’s just to say that the way he has asked the question looks to me like he hasn’t allowed the full weight of Scripture to be brought to bear on (and thus question) what he still thinks the core or essence of salvation actually is.
So I wonder…as North American Christianity sheds its pastoral stance towards the surrounding culture and continues to adopt more of a missional stance, will baptism be given a more prominent role in the conversion process?
From where I sit, in much of evangelical Christianity baptism as it relates to the conversion process has been reduced into an obcurity in exchange for a prayer that can be said after a quick two-minute explination of John 3.16. Perhaps I am being a bit sarcastic and hyperbolic but when we read Romans 6, the Apostle Paul clearly believed that baptism was a turning (conversion) point whereby we turned away (died) from the old self characterized by its enslavement to sin and were raised into the new life of Christ. It is this turning point that Paul sees as the point of departure for why we should no longer live in sin.
While my own Christian heritage (Restoration Movement) arguably turned baptism into a means of earning salvation (something I deeply regret), it seems to take an opposite but equally disaterous hermeneutic to relegate baptism to its current place in most of evagelicalism. And just in case some might want to accuse me of advocating a works-based conversion, the passive-tense voice of the verbs (been baptized, been buried) in Rom 6.3-4 means that baptism, properly understood, is NOT our work but God’s work in us.
Why is this important? In my opinion, the reduction of conversion to a rote prayer has resulted resulted in many accepting Christ the Savior but not necessarily accepting Christ the Lord who demands discipleship of us. The description Paul employs to describe baptism seems to indicate that baptism in the first century was a decision of discipleship. And if my memory serves me correctly, the late first-century document The Didache seems to support this. I personally am not interested in rehashing or revitalizing the old arguments of at what precise point does a sinner become justified from sin. I trust God that he will save us if we put our faith in Christ, regardless of at what point he chooses to do so from a time stand-point. However, I do believe that baptism – as a decision regarding discipleship – in the conversion process must be given a new hearing among a church seeking to live as missional people among its surrounding culture.
Grace and peace,
Rex
Interesting discussion. I think what Ed is trying to do in his post is an important part of the distinctively missional approach emerging out of North American Christianity. I think its worth bringing that conversation into global perspective. How much of our view on soteriology and missional attempts to reform our understanding of it lean on the individualism?
Case in point: Just the other day I heard a missionary tell the story of one potential convert to Christianity in a majority Buddhist culture, who when offered the opportunity and expressing the desire, decided not to proceed with Baptism because members of the same culture refused to be baptized with him. These are clearly the constraints of a communal society. To this we could add the anguish of first generation Christians who wonder about the salvation of their family members, ancestors and generally the salvific worth of their cultures. Missionaries in such a climate, whether indigenous or foreign born, often have to rethink and reconcile anew, their understandings of salvation in parts of the world not so calcified by individualist belief.
How does such rethinking effect the Western, particularly the North American Church? If we do our missional soteriology isolated from these examples, the result could be one model of salvation for us, and another model for the rest. How will that speak to the unity of the Church and the universal element of the Gospel. I definitely want to honor nuance and particularity in the way salvation comes to each of us, but these are tensions and we must make some sense of them.
Michael … what you describe is recapitulation (Irenaeus) theory – most often attached to Christus Victor … I have seen this as having overlap with the “following jesus” mode of soteriology, particularly in its Kingdom oriented, anabaptist motif, even with a little bit of charismatic theology thrown in … I think this becomes crucial for the demarcating of a more clear missional soteriology (for many reasons)…
David .. great book by Driver!
Rex Butts .. I think you’re right on in terms of baptism being a key mode of intiation/spiritual formation in post Chrsitendom contexts … I read Bob Webber’s Journey Into Jesus this way ..
Here is another issue I think church’s seeking to live as missional people must address. As North American Christianity has existed in a pastoral stance towards its culture, there has also been a hyper-eagerness to claim converts. This is observed in the conversion process whereby regardless of what initiation rite is practiced (sinner’s prayer, baptism, etc…) a person can be told the gospel (which has been reduced to personal salvation) in mere minutes followed by a decision for Christ that results in conversion. If, as a missional church, we take committment to discipleship (spiritual formation as you put it) as a prerequisite for baptism (cf. Matt 28.19), would this mean that while baptism might be given a more prominant place in the conversion journey that we would also not be so hastey in baptizing individuals?
It seems that the early (pre-Constitinian) church was not so hastey in baptizing prospect converts to Christianity, wanting to make sure the prospect(s) was willing to accept not just Jesus the Savior but also Jesus the Lord. I seem to recall that Robert Webber articulated something of this viewpoint in his Ancient-Future Evangelism (or perhaps Ancient-Future Faith).
In my own Christian heritage, we employed baptism in the same manner as the sinner’s prayer…both acting as sort of a “ticket to heaven” which I believe has had serious consequences to how the Christian life is practiced. Any ways, I have really enjoyed this post. Thanks!
Grace and peace,
Rex
I totally agree with you, David. The 2 aspects are so tightly connected, it would be ridiculous to try and separate them from each other.
By asking the questions: “What have we been saved from?” and “What does this saved life look like?”, it would be impossible to say that “sin” is just a vertical or just a horizontal problem.
The pursuit of self-actualization drives us away from God and our neighbor simultaneously. And reconciliation and healing toward wholeness can only happen simultaneously in the context of those 2 types of relationships as well.
I suspect some of the problems listed above relate to a larger filter through which we read Scripture in modernity. So, rather than a big story, we objectified and then distilled propositions. Essentially we made faith an abstraction. You can hear the missing links in this: no theology of place, heaven abstracted from earth, people abstracted from communities, etc. Now two quotes to follow, one from Davids first book:
“Lindbeck explained that doctrine functions in one of three ways: as propositions, as expressive-experiential articulation, or as cultural-linguistic grammars. The lecture hall views doctrines as verifiable propositions while the feel-good pep rally sees doctrines as the articulation of experiences. The former locates truth in spoken or written words while the latter locates truth in immediate experience. In the cultural-linguistic mode, doctrines of God function as comprehensive interpretive schemes “usually embodied in myths or narratives.. which structure human experience and understanding of self and world” (113). Lindbeck’s model argues for designing worship as an enculturated living place of God where our personal character is formed into the specific culture of Christ in order to know truthfully and experience God in worship.”
And this from Rodney Clapp, A Peculiar People (186. though Newbigin says something very similar in The Household of God)..
“Reclaiming Christianity as culture enables us to move from decontextualized propositions to traditioned, storied, inhabitable truths; from absolute certainty to humble confidence; from austere mathematical purity to the rich if less predictable world of relational trust; from control of the data to respect of the other in all its created variety; from individualist knowing to communal knowing and being known; and from once-for-all rational justification to the ongoing pilgrimage of testimony.”
Good question. Do the king and the kingdom need to be seen in opposition to one another? I doubt Ed himself would like it phrased that way, but in limiting his criticizism to liberal extremism he falls short of calling out evangelicals on rampant individualism. The kingdom connotations of the word king should not be minimized.
I don’t usually chime in on discussions like this, but this one piqued my interest. I was just reflecting on my blog about this very thing last night but somehow what I wrote got lost. I grew up as a Southern Baptist and the way Ed frames this conversation is a very SB way of framing it. Mission in that imagination too easily means getting people to punch their ticket to heaven. It’s as if the focal point of the Gospel is a world wide group if individuals who operate as individualists. And of course ifthe focus of a church is not on getting individuals saved then it’s a liberal church who only looks at issues of social justice and Jesus’ example.
To me this is a tired way of raising the issue. It requires us to focus on the wrong question. If we want to talk about salvation then we need to speak to the nature of the problem. What’s wrong with the world? When we talk about this, it’s clear that we have to go back to creation and to what God intended for the world. Adam was charged to steward creation, not just to have a individual relation with God. We have a creation problem, which of course includes people, but the issues that need salvation are larger than getting people to individually receive grace through faith.
Simply put: instead of responding to Ed’s question in the way it has been framed, I think that having a missional imagination calls us to reframe the question around God’s intent of creation, how we messed it up and what God seeks to bring to restore creation.
To respond to this would require much more than I can offer, but I think then we see that salvation is not simply about his death or his life. It’s about his life, his death, his resurrection, and the coming of the Spirit to empower the church to participate in his re-creation life.
Heh.. Jared also rejects the frame of the question. That is worth a discussion in itself — really difficult to discuss an issue cross-paradigms. The limits of language – language exists in sub-worlds of its own that constricts particular conversations. Theoretically, we should be able to move beyond that constriction by entering the bible’s own cadences?
I do agree that the larger telos must be kept in view — where is God taking all this? What is his larger vision for new creation? Asking these sorts of questions even subverts much of the current framing of “spiritual formation.”
no doubt, Irenaeus did a great job of emphasizing this. But the danger in saying, “Yup, that’s what Irenaeus said” is that many people say that and then categorize it as a post-biblical development. Then people either dismiss it (if they don’t give much cred to “tradition”) or give it secondary status at best. Truth is, recapitulation was Irenaeus’ way of communicating a biblical truth, reflected in both Paul and perhaps especially the Gospels (read properly). Anyhow, I know you’d not dismiss it, and of course it is Irenaean, but it’s also Pauline, etc.
[...] David Fitch responds to Ed’s contention that salvation took a turn during the Enlightenment, saying I don’t think either Luther or Calvin imagined what modernity would eventually do in isolating and reducing the atonement to a forensic transaction between each individual and God. This view of salvation became fully flowered in American revivalistic evangelicalism. This view of salvation, I would argue, has done as much damage to the furtherance of Mission in the world as the protestant mainline development. [...]
[...] it means to be missional. There are already many incredible contributions (such as these from David Fitch and Brother Maynard, to name just two). The topic has been on my mind a great deal more of late [...]
Just double checked the links and they are not working.
But if you go to RadicalChurchPlanting.com then to Resources and then to Evangelism, you can see all of the links.
[...] it means to be missional. There are already many incredible contributions (such as these from David Fitch and Brother Maynard, to name just two). The topic has been on my mind a great deal more of late [...]
David,
My initial post seems to have been deleted so here’s another attempt into the conversation. I have corrected the links. [These discussions are dangerous aren’t they? I always hear the echo of Acts 17:21 … “Now all the Athenians and the foreigners who lived there would spend their time in nothing except telling or hearing something new.” (ESV) ]
Lord, save us from doing a lot of talking with no action.
David, I need to ‘push’ back a bit on your comment about the effects of the enlightenment. This has become a popular comment of late throughout the blogosphere but I don’t think it holds up quite as well historically as we might think. Here’s your comment:
“Yet we must not ignore the part of the protestant wing that carried forensic atonement to new individualistic heights primarily under the influence of the Enlightenment. I don’t think either Luther or Calvin imagined what modernity would eventually do in isolating and reducing the atonement to a forensic transaction between each individual and God.” David Fitch
I’m not so sure.
For a number of years I have been reading the early church fathers to find evidence of what their gospel actually was. What was preached as gospel in the first, second, third, fourth, etc centuries? It has been an exciting adventure.
What I have found is a surprising consistency and a very propositional and individualistic understanding of the gospel’s call. For example, Clement’s Letter to the Corinthians the chapters 7-9, or the epistle of Mathetes to Diognetus in the second century or in the Athanasius in the fourth century or perhaps the clearest that I have found, Anselm in the 11th century ( There are pdf files on all of these at http://radicalchurchplanting.com/evangelism.html ).
All of these “gospels” are pre-enlightenment and display a distinct individualistic tone. To be sure, it is not the only tone but they bear a remarkable similarity to some of the outlines in tracts that are used now in various evangelism training curriculums in use today.
As we explore what it means to live missionally and sacrificially in the world, (in my last church we used to call it “living passionately for and like Jesus”) let’s not lose the bold, and humbly confident heralding of the good news, while in Jesus name, we enter in all manner of service to the poor and the rich, the abused and the abusers, offering a free gospel to a world in need of a full redemption.
Enough of a push back. David, thank you for engaging in a robust discussion.
Marty,
Thanks for the effort to gte your comment up. Without knowing the quotes and the context of the writing you’re talking about, it’s hard to know how to respond to your assertion fairly. I’ll just say however, that you can certianly find the word “proposition” on say Calvin … but it has a different meaning and does different work in its later Enlightenment development. Likeiwse individualist p[artiicpation in salvation has never been the question, it is the interrelationship with God’s greater work in the world that changes … as the Enlightenmetn begins to get worked out … most significantly on the American frontier …
Perhaps a coffee or sitting down with patristic scholars simeday might throw more light on the isse …
Blessings .. DF
David, the link is now working so the quotes I refer to are easy to see.
I would welcome a time to sit down with you over coffee and a patristic scholar or two at our side.
[...] David Fitch: Missional Soteriology: Does the Missional Vision Change How People are Saved? [...]