Salvation

"How does God decide who receives the gracious gift of salvation?" That provocative question was raised in a blog posting over at Jesus Creed.

David answered this question later in his post when he acknowledged "The final judgment is God's prerogative alone." To speculate on the parameters, in my view, threatens to do violence to others and undermines the mission of the Church. The aim may be better spent in seeking to discern what drives humans to seek to distill a formula for salvation. Maybe the "solution" is to direct the focus of the community of faith toward recognizing the centrality of Jesus for living the time in-between, and moving forward in that relationship - with the focus on listening and obedience to His voice, if you will.

I suppose we humans have this bent that we can solve all mysteries given a little time and space, and if we can’t that means the mystery isn’t real or truth or as some of the new atheists like to label believers, taken over by the mythology called Christianity. To me, it’s like all the excitement about the scientists who are claiming to have created life (A Step to Artificial Life). I have this feeling that science will never be able to “create” life. Rather, the best science can do is to modify that which is already alive. From what I can tell, other than God, no one has been able to create something from nothing (the whole ex nihilio idea). Life is a mystery to those scientists and it just isn’t something that they can, or will down the road, be able to resolve.

"We are chosen to bring the Gospel, in all its fullness, into all of creation" and "We, the Church, have been elected for mission" (2 more quotes from that post) fits into this critique of seeking to render a formula - or to be more accurate and charitable, a significant risk of reducing the Gospel to a formula which is just as offensive and violent. The recent impulse of mission-mindedness seems to be a necessary corrective for living in the here and now and for accomplishing that bringing of the Gospel into all of creation, but it’s the how and in what ways that is the real crunching question. My thoughts have been pretty well set out before, but I am afraid that as we move into this mission mindset we will fall into the temptation to make it a program as well and convert the active and on-going listening and obeying into heard it and here’s what we need to do.

I’m not suggesting that good works aren’t important if you will or that programs are anathema but at best the identification of good works is a secondary consideration. Rather, that we are in serious need of listening to the voice and being obedient to that voice for the season for doing what we are doing for that reason as opposed to trying to solve the mystery and distilling a reasonable (how about that for a dangerous place to be – debating what is reasonable and rational) answer to that mystery, bottling it up and moving it into the market place of ideas.