Freedom from Decay for Glory
seven
SALVATION
John Stott
Mission denotes what God sends his people into the world to do, and of primary importance within this mission of sacrificial service is evangelism, the sharing with others of God’s good news about Jesus. Dialogue, a serious conversation in which we listen as well as speak, is an activity closely related to evangelism. On the one hand it is an activity in its own right, whose goal is mutual understanding. On the other, since the Christian is under the constraint of love to bear witness to Christ, dialogue is also a necessary preliminary to evangelism. Indeed it is the truly human and Christian context within which evangelistic witness should be given. To confess this frankly does not destroy the integrity of the dialogue on the ground that it now has an ulterior motive, and has degenerated into an exercise in public relations whose real objective is the conversion of the other person. This candor rather preserves the integrity of the dialogue by preserving the integrity of the Christian who participates in the dialogue. For the Christian would be true neither to him- or herself, nor to their partner in the dialogue, if they concealed either their belief in the universal lordship of Jesus or their longing that their partner will join them in submission to Jesus as Lord. Such submission in penitence and faith is the way of salvation, which is the fourth word we are to consider. What does salvation mean?
The Centrality of Salvation
The word salvation itself may be problematic. Some people find salvation language embarrassing, while others assert that it is a meaningless inheritance from the traditional religious vocabulary of the past. Certainly, then, if Christians are to continue to use the word, it needs to be translated into a more modern idiom. This is fine, even essential, on condition that we remain loyal to the biblical revelation. For a translation is one thing (the old message in new words); a fresh composition or reconstruction is something quite different. And my concern is that some contemporary interpretations of the word are radical reconstructions that are far from loyal to the Bible’s portrayal of the salvation that God offers humanity through Christ.
It may be good at once to recognize how vital this question is. For it is no exaggeration to say that Christianity is a religion of salvation. The God of the Bible is a God who has kept coming to the rescue of his people, who has taken the initiative to save. Six times in the Pastorals he is called “God our Savior”: “‘God’ and ‘Saviour’ are synonymous throughout the whole of the Old Testament,” writes Michael Green. The same could be said about the New Testament, for the mission of Jesus was a rescue mission. He “came into the world to save sinners” (1 Timothy 1:15). “The Father has sent his Son as the Savior of the world” (1 John 4:14). His very name embodies his mission, for “Jesus” means “God the Savior” or “God is salvation” (Matthew 1:21), and his full title is “our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ” (see, for example, 2 Peter 3:18).
So the whole Bible is a Heilsgeschichte, a history of God’s mighty saving acts. Indeed, it is more than a chronicle of the past; it is a contemporary handbook of salvation, “able to instruct you for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus” (2 Timothy 3:15). And of course the gospel is called “the gospel of your salvation” (Ephesians 1:13), even “the power of God for salvation to every one who has faith” (Romans 1:16), because it is through the kerygma that God chooses to “save those who believe” (1 Corinthians 1:21). This prominence of the salvation theme in biblical Christianity obliges us to ask what it is that God works, that Christ achieves, that Scripture unfolds and that the gospel offers. I have to begin with two negatives.
Salvation and Physical Health
First, salvation does not mean psycho-physical health. There have been those who seek to equate salvation with health, and especially with “wholeness” understood as a kind of composite health embracing body, mind and spirit. Physical and mental healing, we are told, is of the very essence of the gospel of God’s grace. Salvation is for the whole person, including the restoration of body, mind and soul to wholeness. At the psychological level, salvation becomes a kind of personal integration, the wholeness of a balanced personality.
Let me be very clear on the precise point at which I am disagreeing with such a view. I am not denying that according to Scripture, disease is an alien intrusion into God’s good world, nor that it is often ascribed to the malevolent activity of Satan, nor that God heals both through natural means and sometimes supernaturally (for all healing is divine healing), nor that Jesus’ miraculous healings were signs of his kingdom, nor that he showed both indignation toward sickness and compassion toward the sick, nor that illness, pain and death will find no place in the new bodies and the new universe that God is going one day to create. For I believe all those truths, and hope that they are common ground. I would go further and say that a greater measure of health often follows an experience of salvation. Now that psychosomatic medicine attributes many conditions to stress, while social medicine attributes others to environmental causes, it is to be expected that salvation, because it often leads to the relief of stress and to an improved environment, will also sometimes bring healing of mind and body. Moreover, all Christians should be able to affirm joyfully with Paul that the life of Jesus can be manifested in our mortal flesh (2 Corinthians 4:10-11) and that the power of Jesus is made perfect in our human weakness (2 Corinthians 12:9-10; compare 2 Corinthians 4:7). For our new life in Christ can often bring a new sense of physical and emotional well-being.
What I do deny is that this healing, or indeed any kind of healing—natural or supernatural—either is, or is included in, what the Bible means by the salvation that is now offered to humanity by Christ through the gospel. Of course at the consummation, God will redeem the total creation including our human bodies, and this may rightly be termed full and final salvation, but to assert that healing is as readily and as instantly available today as salvation, or that such healing is part of the salvation that God offers us in Christ by faith now, or that believing Christians have no business ever to be ill, is an attempt to anticipate the resurrection and redemption of our bodies. Not till then will disease and death be no more.
One result of the confusion of salvation and health is that the roles of the doctor and the pastor also become confused. Either the doctor replaces the pastor, or the pastor transforms himself into an amateur physician or psychiatrist. In his perceptive booklet Will Hospital Replace the Church? Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, who himself gave up being a consultant physician in order to become a pastor, agrees that the hospital has quite rightly taken over the healing of the sick. Then he adds, “The Hospital does not, cannot, and never will be able to take over the functions of the Church! It is quite impossible for it to do so. . . . The authentic task of the Church is not primarily to make people healthy . . . her essential task is to restore men to right relationship with God. . . . Man’s real problem is not simply that he is sick, but that he is a rebel.”
At this stage in my argument some may wish to reply that salvation is used in the New Testament, particularly in the Gospels, to denote a physical deliverance. They are quite right—at least verbally—and we need to examine their point. Sōzō is used of deliverance from blindness (in the case of blind Bartimaeus, Mark 10:52), from leprosy (Luke 17:19) and from an issue of blood (Mark 5:34). In each case Jesus said to the sufferer “your faith has saved you,” which each time the Authorized Version renders “thy faith hath made thee whole.” The same was said of a crowd of people who were sick with unspecified diseases. As many as touched Christ’s garment, we are told, “were made well,” which in the Greek is esōzonto, “were saved,” and in the Authorized Version “were made whole” (Mark 6:56, compare Acts 14:9; James 5:15). But sōzō is also used of deliverance from drowning (“Save, Lord; we are perishing,” Matthew 8:25; compare Matthew 14:30 and Acts 27:20, 31, 34, 43–28:4) and even from death (“Save yourself, and come down from the cross! . . . He saved others; he cannot save himself” (Mark 15:30-31; compare John 12:27; Hebrews 5:7).
All this is true. But what does it prove? Are we to argue from these uses of the verb “to save” that wherever the New Testament promises salvation to believers it is offering them not only deliverance from sin but also a kind of comprehensive insurance against physical ills of every kind, including disease, drowning and even death? No. It would be impossible to reconstruct the biblical doctrine of salvation in these terms. Salvation by faith in Christ crucified and risen is moral not material, a rescue from sin not from harm, and the reason why Jesus said “your faith has saved you” to both categories is that his works of physical rescue (from disease, drowning and death) were intentional signs of his salvation, and were thus understood by the early church.
We need to remember that the miracles of Jesus were constantly called sēmeion, signs of his kingdom, signs of his salvation. Further, the apostles recognized them to be such, and no doubt used these miracle stories in their preaching and teaching. Jesus’ well-known words “your faith has saved you” were spoken to the fallen woman who anointed his feet and whom he forgave (Luke 7:48-50). They were also spoken to the blind man, the leprosy sufferer and the woman with the issue of blood not because their cure was their salvation, but because it was a dramatized parable of it.
The form-critical interpretation of the Gospels strongly suggests such an evangelistic use of these well-known incidents. For example, sin is a chronic inward moral disease, which no human being can cure, and if we turn to human remedies we shall not improve but rather get worse. So let the sinner put out the hand of faith and let her but touch the hem of Christ’s garment, and she will be made whole, that is, saved. Again, do the storms of sinful passion and even of the wrath of God threaten to engulf us? Then let us cry to Jesus Christ, “Save, Lord; we are perishing,” and immediately he will still the storm, and we shall not perish but be saved, and go on to enjoy the peace and calm of his salvation. This is how the early church used these stories of physical deliverance. They believed Jesus had intended them to be illustrations of salvation, not promises of safety or health.
Similarly, the apostle Peter after healing the congenital cripple outside the temple gate could move straight from the means by which “this man has been saved” (sesōtai, RSV “has been healed”) to the affirmation that “there is salvation [sōtēria] in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved [sōthēnai]” (Acts 4:9, 12). The man’s healing was “a notable sign” (Acts 4:16) of his salvation.
Salvation and Political Liberation
Second, salvation is not sociopolitical liberation. There are theologians whose doctrine of salvation locates our chief human predicament not in our physical and mental sicknesses, but in our social and political structures. They therefore reinterpret salvation as the liberation of deprived and disadvantaged people from hunger, poverty and war; from colonial domination, political tyranny, racial discrimination and economic exploitation; from the ghettos, the political prisons and the soulless technology of the modern world. Not disease but oppression is the problem; so salvation is justice, not health. This reconstruction of salvation dominated the World Council of Churches in the 1960s and ’70s.
The emphasis in this interpretation of salvation is on key words like humanization, development, wholeness, liberation and justice. Let me say at once, not only that these things, and the liberation of people from every form of oppression, are a desirable goal, pleasing to God the Creator, but also that Christians should be actively involved in pursuing that goal alongside other men and women of compassion and goodwill. For God created all people and cares for all people. He means human beings to live together in peace, freedom, dignity and justice. These things in every society are the concern of God, for the God of the Bible is the God of justice as well as of justification, and he hates injustice and tyranny. Further, we evangelicals have often been guilty of opting out of our social and political responsibilities. We are to blame for this neglect. We should repent of it and not be afraid to challenge ourselves and each other that God may be calling many more Christians than hear his call to immerse themselves in the secular world of politics, economics, sociology, race relations, community health, development and a host of other such spheres for Christ.
The Theology of Liberation
The strongest advocates of this view of salvation are those who espouse the “theology of liberation.” And the earliest exponent of such theology, at least in the awareness of readers in the Western world, is Gustavo Gutiérrez. The original Spanish version of Gutiérrez’s book A Theology of Liberation was published in Peru in 1971, and then in English several years later. Subtitled History, Politics and Salvation, this is the fullest and most thorough attempt that has yet been made to interpret biblical salvation in terms of the liberation of the oppressed. The background to the book is threefold: Latin America the “oppressed continent,” the Roman Catholic Church and its aggiornamento, and Marxist economic theory. I admire the deep compassion of Gutiérrez for the exploited, his insistence on solidarity with the poor, his emphasis on social “praxis” instead of unpractical theorizing, and his call to the church for “a more evangelical, more authentic, more concrete and more efficacious commitment to liberation.” Several times he quotes with approval Marx’s famous dictum that “the philosophers have only interpreted the world . . . ; the point, however, is to change it.”
We should have no quarrel with the goal he defines, namely, “liberation from all that limits or keeps man from self-fulfilment, liberation from all impediments to the exercise of his freedom.” This is fully biblical. God made humanity in his own image; we should oppose all that dehumanizes it. Again, “the goal is not only better living conditions, a radical change of structures, a social revolution; it is much more: the continuous creation, never ending, of a new way to be a man, a permanent cultural revolution.”
What are the means to this end? One of the recurrent themes of the book is that history is the process in which humankind grows in self-consciousness, “gradually takes hold of the reins of his [sic] own destiny,” wins its freedom and thus creates a new society. In sociological and technological terms, humans have indeed “come of age.” They now possess in full measure that “dominion” that God told them to exercise at the beginning of creation (Genesis 1:26-28).
All this—the need for people to free and to fulfill themselves, and to take responsibility for the restructuring of their society—is biblical and right. Both the end and the means are well defined. It is when the author begins to theologize, to try to present social liberation as if this were what Scripture means by salvation, and so to dispense with evangelism in favor of political action, that—reluctantly but decidedly—I part company with him.
Gutiérrez himself asks the basic question, “What relation is there between salvation and the historical process of the liberation of man?” It is, he adds, “the classic question of the relation between . . . faith and political action, or in other words between the Kingdom of God and the building up of the world.” He hangs back from identifying the two. But he comes very close to it, and in order to do so indulges in some extremely dubious exegesis.
He all but obliterates the distinction between church and world, Christian and non-Christian, in order that he may apply to all human beings the biblical teaching about God’s saving work. Whether they are conscious of it or not, he writes, “all men are in Christ efficaciously called to communion with God.” Indeed this, he dares to add, is “the Pauline theme of the universal lordship of Christ, in whom all things exist and have been saved.” It also “gives religious value in a completely new way to the action of man in history, Christian and non-Christian alike. The building of a just society has worth in terms of the Kingdom, or in more current phraseology, to participate in the process of liberation is already in a certain sense a salvific work.”
In the chapter titled “Encountering God in History” he again universalizes the work and the presence of God. Beginning with the “temple” imagery of Scripture, he goes on to make the statement, entirely unwarranted even on his own premises, that “the Spirit sent by the Father and the Son to carry the work of salvation to its fulfilment dwells in every man.” Again, “since God became man, humanity, every man, history is the living temple of God.” And Christ’s “liberation creates a new chosen people, which this time includes all humanity.” There is absolutely no biblical justification for such statements. On the contrary, the New Testament authors constantly contradict this notion by insisting on the distinction between those who are in Christ and those who are not, those who have the Spirit and those who do not (for example, Romans 8:9; 1 John 5:12).
Is there no place, then, in Gutiérrez’s scheme for conversion? Yes, but it is fundamentally “conversion to the neighbour.” He has already affirmed that “man is saved if he opens himself to God and to others, even if he is not clearly aware that he is doing so.” The struggle to be unselfish and “to create an authentic brotherhood among men” is itself a response to God’s grace, whether the people concerned explicitly confess Christ as Lord or not. Indeed, the only way to love God is to love my neighbor, the only way to know God is to do justice. Now certainly a true love and knowledge of God must issue in love and justice to our neighbor, but to put this the other way around and make the knowledge of God the consequence of doing justice, and even to equate the two, is uncommonly like a doctrine of salvation by good works.
The author keeps urging that beyond and through “the struggle against misery, injustice and exploitation the goal is the creation of a new man.” He knows that this is both a Marxist and also a biblical expression. But he betrays no embarrassment that although the words are the same, the sense in which they are used may be different. The “one new man” or “single new humanity” of which Paul writes is God’s creation by Christ’s death and God’s gift to those who are personally in Christ (Ephesians 2:15-16; 2 Corinthians 5:17). It is hard to believe that Gutiérrez seriously thinks this is the same as the “creation” through Marxism of a new social order and lifestyle for all people whether Christian or not.
Although liberation from oppression and the creation of a new and better society are definitely God’s good will for humanity, it is necessary to add that these things do not constitute the “salvation” that God is offering the world in and through Jesus Christ. They could be included in “the mission of God,” as we have seen, insofar as Christians are giving themselves to serve in these fields. But to call sociopolitical liberation “salvation” and to call social activism “evangelism”—this is to be guilty of a gross theological confusion. It is to mix what Scripture keeps distinct—God the Creator and God the Redeemer, the God of the cosmos and the God of the covenant, the world and the church, common grace and saving grace, justice and justification, the reformation of society and the regeneration of humanity. For the salvation offered in the gospel of Christ concerns persons rather than structures. It is deliverance from another kind of yoke than political and economic oppression.
The Hermeneutical Question
My deep uneasiness about the form of liberation theology espoused within the ecumenical movement is basically hermeneutical. It concerns the treatment of Scripture, both Old Testament and New Testament, with which its proponents attempt to buttress it. Other critics than myself have alluded to the misuse of Scripture at ecumenical assemblies. It is sometimes arbitrarily selective (omitting what is inconvenient), and at other times extremely cavalier (twisting what seems convenient in order to support a preconceived theory). One Roman Catholic observer at the Salvation Today Bangkok conference in 1973, for example, lamented that although the conference had talked a lot about “salvation,” it had not listened to how the apostle Paul spoke of it. Nobody had mentioned justification by faith or everlasting life.
The main biblical evidence adduced for the sociopolitical interpretation of salvation is drawn from the Old Testament, namely the liberation of Israel from its Egyptian oppressors. Gustavo Gutiérrez leans heavily on this interpretation of the exodus. The people of Israel were slaves, suffering economic exploitation and a brutal form of population control. In their bondage they “groaned” and cried to God, and God told Moses he knew their oppression and had “come down to deliver [or liberate] them” (Exodus 3:7-10). Years later at the Red Sea they were told to “stand firm, and see the salvation of the LORD.” When the rescue was complete, it was written “thus the LORD saved Israel,” and Israel became known as “the people whom thou hast redeemed” (Exodus 14:13, 30; 15:13).
We must ask, however, whether this biblical narrative can be applied to any or every group of oppressed people, and whether it can be regarded as the kind of liberation that God intends or promises for all the oppressed. Surely the answer must be “no.”
Certainly oppression in every form is hateful to God. Certainly too God is active in the history of every nation. So much so that his word through Amos drew an analogy between Israel on the one hand and the Philistines and Syrians on the other: “Did I not bring up Israel from the land of Egypt, and the Philistines from Caphtor and the Syrians from Kir?” (Amos 9:7). But this was to assert that Israel could not monopolize Yahweh as if he were a tribal deity; it did not deny the special relationship that God had established between himself and his people Israel. On the contrary, it was again through Amos that God asserted the uniqueness—and therefore the moral implication—of this relationship:
You only have I known
of all the families of the earth;
therefore I will punish you
for all your iniquities. (Amos 3:2; compare Psalm 147:20)
It was this same special relationship that lay behind the exodus. God rescued his people from Egypt in fulfillment of his covenant with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and in anticipation of its renewal at Mount Sinai (Exodus 2:24; 19:4-6). He made no covenant with the Syrians or the Philistines, and neither did his providential activity in their national life make them his covenant people. In Scripture, “salvation” and “covenant” always belong together. Hence in the New Testament the exodus becomes a picture of our redemption from sin by Christ, not a promise of liberation for all politically oppressed minorities.
We can have no objection to the use of the word salvation in a political sense, provided it is clear that we are not talking theologically about God’s salvation in and through Christ. When the New Testament handles Old Testament promises of salvation, it interprets them in moral rather than material terms. Perhaps the most striking example is the song of Zechariah, in which the “horn of salvation” that God had raised up, according to his promise through the prophets “that we should be saved from our enemies,” is understood in terms of serving God “in holiness and righteousness,” while John the Baptist will “go before the Lord to prepare his ways, to give knowledge of salvation to his people in the forgiveness of their sins” (Luke 1:67-79).
Another popular biblical passage used by those who affirm that salvation can be defined in sociopolitical terms is our Lord’s quotation from Isaiah in the Nazareth synagogue:
The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
and recovering of sight to the blind,
to set at liberty those who are oppressed. (Luke 4:18)
Here three main categories of people are mentioned—the poor, the captives and the blind—and liberation theologies assume that literal, physical conditions are envisaged. But can we take this so easily for granted? It is true that during his ministry Jesus opened the eyes of the blind, and certainly the blind should arouse our Christian compassion today. But Christ’s miraculous restoration of sight was a sign that he was the light of the world; it can hardly be taken as an instruction to us to perform similar miraculous cures today. Jesus also ministered to the poor and had some disconcerting things to say to the rich. Yet it is well known that “the poor” in the Old Testament were not just the needy but the pious whose hope and trust were in God. The first Beatitude cannot possibly be understood as making material poverty a condition of receiving God’s kingdom, unless we are prepared to turn the gospel upside down. What then of captives and the oppressed? There is no evidence that Jesus literally emptied the prisons of Palestine. On the contrary, the main prisoner we hear about (John the Baptist) was left in prison and was executed. What Jesus did do, however, was to deliver people from the spiritual bondage of sin and Satan, and to promise that the truth would set his disciples free.
Please do not misunderstand me. Material poverty, physical blindness and unjust imprisonment are all conditions that in different degrees dehumanize human beings. They should provoke our Christian concern and stimulate us to action for the relief of those who suffer in these ways. My point, however, is that deliverance from these things is not the salvation that Christ died and rose to secure for us.
I have one further exegetical point to make regarding the attempt to interpret salvation in terms of social liberation. It concerns the instructions that the apostles give to slaves in the New Testament. Although they do not directly attack the institution of slavery, yet Paul insists that slaves are to be treated “justly and fairly” (Colossians 4:1). This was a revolutionary assertion, for the concept of “justice” for slaves was never contemplated in the Roman Empire. Indeed, it is this demand for justice that undermined the institution and in the end destroyed it. Further, although Paul does not incite slaves to rebellion, civil disobedience or self-liberation, he does encourage them, if they can gain their freedom, to avail themselves of the opportunity. He thus recognizes that slavery is an offense to human dignity. “Do not become slaves of men,” he writes. But then he adds these significant words: “he who was called in the Lord as a slave is a freedman of the Lord. . . . So, brethren, in whatever state each was called, there let him remain with God” (1 Corinthians 7:20-24). The importance of this teaching should be clear. Slaves who can gain their social freedom should do so, for this is God’s will for them. But if they cannot, let them remember that in Christ, whatever their social condition, they are still free people! Their slavery cannot inhibit their deepest liberty as human beings who have been set free by Jesus Christ, and neither can it destroy their dignity as those whom God has accepted. They can stay even in their slavery “with God.” No doubt I am laying myself open to the old charge of religious drug peddling, of yet more “opium for the people” (recalling Marx’s aphorism that “religion is the opium of the people”). But such an accusation would not be fair. It would never be legitimate to use those two words “with God” to condone oppression or to justify an uncritical acquiescence in the status quo. Rather, they can transform every situation. For they tell us that Jesus Christ gives an inward freedom of the spirit that even the most oppressive tyrant cannot destroy. Think of Paul in prison: was he not free?
So far I have been largely negative. I have tried to argue from Scripture that the “salvation” that Christ once died to win and now offers to the world is neither psycho-physical healing nor sociopolitical liberation. In rejecting these attempted reconstructions I have also tried to guard myself against misunderstanding. It is necessary to balance my negatives with three positive assertions. First, God is greatly concerned for both these areas, namely, our bodies and our society. Second, one day both body and society will be redeemed. We shall be given new bodies and shall live in a new society. Third, love compels us meanwhile to labor in both spheres, seeking to promote physical health (by therapeutic and preventive means) and seeking to create a radically different social order that will bring people freedom, dignity, justice and peace. Nevertheless, having emphasized the importance of these things to God and therefore to us, we still have to affirm that they are not the salvation that God is offering human beings in Christ now.
The Lausanne Covenant expresses the tension clearly:
We affirm that God is both the Creator and the Judge of all men. We therefore should share his concern for justice and reconciliation throughout human society and for the liberation of men from every kind of oppression. Because mankind is made in the image of God, every person, regardless of race, religion, color, culture, class, sex or age, has an intrinsic dignity because of which he should be respected and served, not exploited. . . . Although reconciliation with man is not reconciliation with God, nor is social action evangelism, nor is political liberation salvation, nevertheless we affirm that evangelism and sociopolitical involvement are both part of our Christian duty. For both are necessary expressions of our doctrines of God and man, our love for our neighbor and our obedience to Jesus Christ. The message of salvation implies also a message of judgment upon every form of alienation, oppression and discrimination, and we should not be afraid to denounce evil and injustice wherever they exist.
Salvation and Personal Freedom
What is salvation, then? It is personal freedom. True, it sometimes results in increased physical and mental health, as we have seen. True also, it has far-reaching social consequences for, as the Lausanne Covenant puts it, “the salvation we claim should be transforming us in the totality of our personal and social responsibilities.” Nevertheless, salvation itself, the salvation Christ gives to his people, is freedom from sin in all its ugly manifestations and liberation into a new life of service, until finally we attain “the glorious liberty of the children of God.” Georg Fohrer, in Gerhard Kittel’s Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, makes it clear that salvation words are primarily negative and emphasize what we are saved from. Thus in the Greek world salvation was first and foremost “an acutely dynamic act in which gods or men snatch others by force from serious peril,” whether perils of battle or of the sea, of judicial condemnation or illness. Hence in Greek literature, doctors, philosophers, judges, generals, rulers and especially the emperor are numbered among human “saviors.”
The commonest salvation verb in the Old Testament has the basic idea of broadness or roominess as opposed to the narrowness of some oppression. It thus indicated deliverance out of some imprisonment into spaciousness “through the saving intervention of a third party in favour of the oppressed and in opposition to the oppressor.” “The thought,” Fohrer continues, “is neither that of self-help nor of co-operation with the oppressed. The help is such that the oppressed would be lost without it.” It may be a city that is rescued from a besieging army, a nation from a foreign regime, the poor from injustice, or individuals from some personal calamity.
All this is an important background for our understanding of the salvation of God. He is the living God, the Savior; idols are dead and cannot save. And when God saves his people, he not only rescues them from the oppressor but he saves them for himself. “You have seen what I did to the Egyptians,” he said, “and how I bore you on eagles’ wings and brought you to myself” (Exodus 19:4). This is the theme already mentioned that “salvation” and “covenant” belong together. Similarly the “new song” of praise to Christ in heaven declares, “thou wast slain and by thy blood didst ransom men for God” (Revelation 5:9).
Now freedom is a popular word today. But unfortunately most contemporary talk about freedom is negative. Dictionaries define it negatively. One says it is “the absence of hindrance, restraint, confinement, repression.” Another says that to be free is to be “not enslaved, not imprisoned, unrestricted, unrestrained, unhampered.” And the dictionaries are only reflecting common usage. But we must never define freedom in purely negative terms. Indeed the insistence on a positive understanding of freedom is a distinctively Christian contribution to current debate. Michael Ramsey has written, “We know what we want to free men from. Do we know what we want to free men for?” He goes on to insist that our striving for those freedoms “which most palpably stir our feelings” (that is, freedom from persecution, arbitrary imprisonment, racial discrimination, crippling hunger and poverty) should always be “in the context of the more radical and revolutionary issue of the freeing of man from self and for the glory of God.” Such freedom, he continues, is seen perfectly in Jesus alone: “He is free from someone and free for someone. He is free from self, and free for God.”
So we shall now examine the New Testament doctrine of salvation, in the three phases or tenses in which the Bible speaks of it (past, present and future). In each case we shall observe how the negative and positive aspects complement each other. “Liberation” is a good rendering of salvation, not least because it hints at the liberty into which the liberated are brought.
Freedom from Judgment for Sonship
First of all, in its past phase, “salvation” is liberation from the just judgment of God on sin. It is not just that we had guilt feelings and a guilty conscience, and found relief from these in Jesus Christ. It is that we were actually and objectively guilty before God and have now received a free remission of our guilt, which caused the bad feelings and bad conscience. The reason why the gospel is “the power of God for salvation” is that in it “the righteousness of God is revealed” (namely, his righteous way of declaring the unrighteous righteous), and the reason for this revelation of the righteousness of God in the gospel is the revelation of “the wrath of God . . . from heaven against all ungodliness and wickedness of men who by their wickedness suppress the truth.” This logical sequence of thought in Romans 1:16-18 links the power of God, the righteousness of God and the wrath of God. It is because his wrath is revealed against sin that his righteousness is revealed in the gospel and his power through the gospel to believers.
In this past phase, salvation is the equivalent of justification, which itself is the opposite of condemnation. All those who are “in Christ” are sesōsmenoi (Ephesians 2:8), that is, they are those who have been saved. Likewise, they are dikaiōthentes (Romans 5:1), those who have been justified. Both words are participles in the past tense, indicating something that has already taken place through faith in Christ. Indeed, Romans 10:10 specifically equates the two, for “man believes with his heart and so is justified, and he confesses with his lips and so is saved.” This justification has been made possible only because of the propitiatory sacrifice of Christ (Romans 3:24-26). There is “no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” only because God sent his own Son “in the likeness of sinful flesh and as a sin offering” and “condemned sin in the flesh,” that is, in the flesh in which Jesus came (Romans 8:1-3). Of course the wrath of God is not like human wrath, nor is the propitiation of Christ like heathen propitiations. But once all unworthy elements have been eliminated (namely, the concept of the arbitrary wrath of a vengeful deity being placated by the paltry offerings of humans), we are left with the biblical propitiation in which God’s own love sent his own dear Son to appease his own holy wrath against sin (1 John 2:2; 4:10).
In their unfolding of the first phase of salvation, however, the apostles go further than the propitiation of God’s wrath, and further even than God’s justification of the sinner, which is his acceptance of them as righteous in God’s sight. Paul emphasizes that we are saved from wrath and for sonship. God sent his Son not just to redeem us but also to adopt us into his family. Our judge becomes our father, and the Holy Spirit himself enables us to cry to him “Abba, Father,” thus bearing witness with our own spirit that we are indeed his children. So then we are no longer slaves, but children (Romans 8:14-17; Galatians 4:4-7). Now we are free to live as free men and women.
Freedom from Self for Service
Second, we turn now to the present phase of salvation. For salvation in the New Testament is as much a present process as a gift received in the past. If you ask me if I am saved, and if I think biblically before I answer, I could just as truly reply “no” as “yes.” Yes, I have indeed been saved by the sheer grace of God from his wrath and from my guilt and condemnation. But no, I am not yet saved, for sin still dwells within me, and my body is not yet redeemed. It is the common tension in the New Testament between the “now” and the “not yet.”
It is well known that the verb sōzō is sometimes used in the New Testament in the present tense, as well as in the aorist and the perfect. Christians are hoi sōzomenoi (“those who are being saved”). This is partly because it is recognized that our salvation has not yet been brought to completion. Hoi sōzomenoi (“those who are being saved”) are contrasted with hoi apollymenoi (“those who are perishing”), for they have not yet perished, and we have not yet reached the new creation (compare 1 Corinthians 1:18; 2 Corinthians 2:15; Acts 2:47). Another reason for the present tense is that during the interim between our justification and our glorification comes that process called sanctification, the gradual transformation of the believer by the Spirit of Christ into the image of Christ “from one degree of glory to another” (2 Corinthians 3:18) until in the end we shall be fully conformed to the image of God’s Son (Romans 8:29; compare 1 John 3:2).
Moreover, since Jesus Christ into whose image we are being changed is “the second man” or “second Adam” (Romans 5 and 1 Corinthians 15), the pioneer of the new humanity, we ourselves who are in Christ are sharers in this new humanity. To become Christian is in a real sense to become human, because nothing dehumanizes more than rebellion against God, and nothing humanizes more than reconciliation to God and fellowship with God. But to assert joyfully that salvation includes humanization is not at all the same thing as saying that humanization (rescuing people from the dehumanizing process of modern society) equals salvation.
The ecumenical argument seems to run like this: Salvation according to the New Testament makes people human; therefore whatever makes people human is salvation. But this kind of reasoning is as deficient in logic as in theology. One might just as well say: “Aspirin relieves pain; therefore whatever relieves pain is aspirin.”
Salvation as a present process is expressed in two surprising apostolic commands. “Work out your own salvation,” Paul writes, calling on the Philippians to exhibit in practical, everyday living the salvation that God is working within them (Philippians 2:12-13), while the apostle Peter stresses the need of his readers to “grow up to salvation” (1 Peter 2:2). Since in the previous verse he has told them to put away all malice, deceit, insincerity, envy and slander, it is evident that he regards these things as babyish and that the “salvation” he wants them to grow up into is again Christlikeness of behavior.
In this present salvation too we should emphasize the positive. We are being delivered from the bondage of self-centeredness into the liberty of service. Jesus spoke of our being the slaves of sin, and there is no slavery worse than imprisonment in oneself. Luther described fallen humanity as homo incurvatus in se, “man curved or bent inwards upon himself.” From this prison Jesus Christ liberates us. He warns us that if we insist on “saving” ourselves, holding on to our own life in selfishness, we shall lose ourselves. By contrast, only if we are prepared to lose ourselves by giving ourselves away in service to him and to others, shall we ever truly find ourselves (Mark 8:35). It is only when we die that we live, only when we serve that we are free.
This present salvation, this liberation from the shackles of our own self-centeredness into the freedom of service, brings more thoroughgoing demands than we are often prepared to recognize. To quote from the Lausanne Covenant again, “the results of evangelism include obedience to Christ, incorporation into his church and responsible service in the world.” Unless we are truly delivered from a slavish conformity to tradition, convention and the bourgeois materialism of secular culture, unless our discipleship is radical enough to make us critical of establishment attitudes and indignant over all forms of oppression, and unless we are now freely and selflessly devoted to Christ, church and society, we can hardly claim to be saved, or even to be in the process of being saved. Salvation and the kingdom of God are synonymous (compare Mark 10:23-27), and in the kingdom the authority of Jesus is absolute.
It is impossible to grasp the fullness of this present phase of salvation, as depicted in the New Testament, without feeling ashamed of our contemporary Christian failures. We tend so to glory in our past salvation as a free gift already received that we neglect the call to “grow up to salvation” and to give ourselves wholeheartedly with our fellow believers to the service of God and humanity. If we reflect on the challenge of his present sense of “being saved,” we should recognize that the church itself needs liberation—liberation from all that is false to the demands of discipleship to the Lord Jesus Christ, and contrary to the transforming and renewing power of the gospel.
Freedom from Decay for Glory
Third, moving to the future aspect, God’s salvation, which is both a gift and a continuing process, is also the object of our Christian hope. We were saved in hope of being saved, and the “hope of salvation” is the helmet that the Christian soldier wears (1 Thessalonians 5:8; compare Romans 8:24).
Each day brings this salvation closer, for “salvation is nearer to us now than when we first believed” (Romans 13:11; compare 1 Peter 1:5, 9). We do not, however, cherish the kind of utopian vision that Gustavo Gutiérrez describes in his chapter “Eschatology and Politics.” On the contrary, “we reject as a proud self-confident dream the notion that man can ever build a utopia on earth. Our Christian confidence is that God will perfect his Kingdom and we look forward with eager anticipation to that day and to the new heaven and earth in which righteousness will dwell and God will reign for ever.”
What will it be, this final salvation? To begin with, it will be a deliverance from the wrath to come (Romans 5:9; 1 Thessalonians 1:10; 5:9). More than that, it will include “the redemption of our bodies.” For our bodies share with the whole creation a “bondage to decay” that makes the creation groan as if in labor and makes us groan inwardly as well. We long for our new bodies (which will be liberated from physical frailty, a fallen nature and mortality) and for the new universe (in which there will be no oppression but only righteousness). This prospect the New Testament also depicts in positive rather than merely negative terms. For our inward groaning is a longing for our “adoption as sons,” when our sonship will be revealed in its fullness. Similarly, the whole creation will not just “be set free from its bondage to decay” but will “obtain the glorious liberty of the children of God” (see Romans 8:18-25; 2 Peter 3:13).
I have tried to show that in each phase of personal salvation Scripture lays its emphasis not so much on our rescue (from wrath, from self, from decay and death) as on the freedom that this rescue will bring—freedom to live with God as our Father, freedom to give ourselves to the service of others, and finally the “freedom of glory” when, rid of all the limitations of our present fallen existence, we are free to devote ourselves without reserve to God and to each other.
Are we saved? Yes, and “we rejoice” (Romans 5:2-3, 11). Are we saved? No, and in this body with the whole creation, “we groan inwardly” as we wait for the consummation. We rejoice and we groan: this is the paradoxical experience of Christians who have been saved and are being saved, and at the same time are not yet finally saved.
So the gospel is the good news of salvation, and like Paul we must be able to declare that we are not ashamed of it. For as Michael Green rightly says at the end of his thorough study The Meaning of Salvation, “there is still a hunger for salvation” in today’s world. And God’s good news is still his power unto salvation to those who believe. He still saves believers through the kerygma, the announcement of Jesus Christ.
Finally, we must exhibit what we proclaim. Dr. Rhadakrishnan, Hindu philosopher and former president of India, is said to have commented to some Christians, “You claim that Jesus Christ is your Saviour, but you do not appear to be more ‘saved’ than anyone else.” Our message of salvation is bound to fall on deaf ears if we give no evidence of salvation in a changed life and lifestyle. This applies to nobody more directly than to the preacher of the gospel. “The most effective preaching,” writes John Poulton, “comes from those who embody the things they are saying. They are their message. . . . Christians . . . need to look like what they are talking about. It is people who communicate primarily, not words or ideas. . . . Authenticity gets across from deep down inside people. . . . What communicates now is basically personal authenticity.” And personal Christian authenticity is an authentic experience of salvation.