Chapter 11: The Nature and Basis of Salvation
11
The Nature and Basis of Salvation
Christianity holds that the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ have changed things. The created order, and above all humanity, has fallen into disorder. Things are not what they are meant to be. And something has to be done about this. The same God who made the created order therefore acts to renew and reorder it. The Christian doctrine of sin tries to give an account of what went wrong; the doctrine of salvation deals with the restoration of the created order, and above all humanity, to its proper relationship to God. Irenaeus of Lyons (c.130–c.202) set out a theologically rich summary of these ideas in his classic treatise “Against the Heresies,” written in the second half of the second century:
The Lord therefore ransomed us by his own blood, and gave his life for our life, his flesh for our flesh; and he poured out the Spirit of the Father to bring about the union and fellowship of God and humanity, bringing God down to humanity through the Spirit while raising humanity to God through his incarnation, and in his coming surely and truly giving us incorruption through the fellowship which we have with him.
The concept of “atonement” is widely used to refer to the transformation of the human situation through Christ. The term is found in the theological literature both as a noun (“Christ made atonement for human sin”) and as a verb (“Christ atoned for human sin”). The Scottish theologian John McLeod Campbell (1800–72) used the term in a way that would find wide consensus within the Christian theological tradition: “Atonement is to be regarded as that by which God has bridged over the gulf which separated between what sin had made us, and what it was the desire of the divine love that we should become.” This raises the question, not simply of the nature of sin and salvation, but the manner in which the gulf between them is overcome. We shall be exploring two major questions in the present chapter: what is the basis of salvation? And how is salvation to be understood? We shall consider the related notion of sin in Chapter 14.
The English word “atonement” can be traced back to 1526, when the English writer William Tyndale (c.1494–1536) was translating the New Testament into English. There was, at that time, no generally accepted native English word which meant “reconciliation.” Tyndale thus had to invent such a word – “the atonement.” This word “atonement” mean “at-one-ment” – that is, being “at one” with someone, or being “reconciled.” This word soon came to bear the additional meaning “the benefits which Jesus Christ brings to believers through his death upon the cross.” This unfamiliar word is rarely used in modern English and has a distinctively old-fashioned feel to it. Rather than convey the impression that Christian thought is totally out of date, theologians now generally prefer to speak of this area as “the doctrine of the work of Christ.”
Figure 11.1 The crucifixion as depicted by Matthias Grünewald (c.1513).
Source: Musée d'Unterlinden, Colmar, France / Bridgeman Images.
The Christian doctrine of salvation focuses on Jesus Christ, as the redeemer and savior of the world. For Christianity, Christ changed things so dramatically, so comprehensively, that both the acts that changed things and the difference that they make needed to be explained. Earlier, we noted that one of the distinctive themes of Christian understandings of the significance of Jesus of Nazareth is that he is the ground of salvation (p. 209). In this chapter, we are going to explore Christian understandings of salvation, looking at both the way in which Jesus of Nazareth is understood to be the foundation of this salvation and what shape that salvation itself takes.
The doctrine of salvation is one of the most fascinating and challenging areas of theology, and displays the great variety of intellectual approaches within the Christian tradition. On the one hand, we find writers who, fired with a wonderful exuberance of the imagination, envisage Christ's death and resurrection as transforming humanity and the entire cosmos, reshaping them and allowing them to share in the divine life. On the other, we find writers who sense the need for caution and want to remain firmly within the realms of the reasonable. Here, Christ is often depicted as offering humanity a superb religious and moral example which will guide and inspire them as they seek to find and lead the good life.
Chapter 10 considered a series of issues concerning the identity of Jesus Christ. As we noticed during that discussion, a central question concerning the identity of Jesus Christ relates to his function. What did Jesus do? Or, even more significantly: what does Jesus do? As we saw in the previous chapter (pp. 225–7), there is an organic relationship between the two central questions:
The identity and function of Jesus Christ can be thought of as two sides of the same coin. The close connection between functional and ontological Christologies (pp. 213, 226) should be noted in this respect.