Category or Spiritual Path?

Frank Schaeffer, Crazy for God (Cambridge: Carroll and Graf, 2007) 390.

Once you buy the evangelical born-again "Jesus saves" mantra, the idea that salvation is a journey goes out the window. You're living in the realm of a magical formula. It seems to me that the [Greek] Orthodox idea of a slow journey to God, wherein no one is instantly "saved" or "lost" and nothing is completely resolved in this life (and perhaps in the next), mirrors the reality of how life works, at least as I've experienced it.

This quote, among other things, came back to me last night after I had done my daily reading of Ellen G. White (one of the founders of Seventh-Day Adventism). I've been reading White's Christ Object Lessons, her book about parables, and the chapter I read yesterday was 19. The Measure of Forgiveness. It's about the man in Matthew 18:21-25 whom the the king forgave of a massive debt, yet this same man did not forgive someone who owed him a smaller amount of money. The unforgiving man is then cast into a debtors' prison, where he is tormented until he pays every last penny of his debt.

At the end of the chapter, Ellen White states: "We are not forgiven because we forgive, but as we forgive. The ground of all forgiveness is found in the unmerited love of God, but by our attitude toward others we show whether we have made that love our own."

I thought about this. I could see Ellen White's point. If I have problems forgiving others, then I may not be internalizing God's forgiveness of me. If God let me off for my sins, after all, then why shouldn't I forgive someone else who's acted badly? What makes me better than the person I'm not forgiving?

But suppose I don't forgive. Does that mean I wasn't saved in the first place, or that I lost my salvation through not forgiving? Is the family of God a revolving door, in which I can go inside and out based on my attitude? The Epistle of Hebrews presents losing one's salvation as a pretty dramatic thing, not as something that occurs through human weakness! Moreover, if I wasn't saved in the first place because of my struggles with resentment, does that mean my entire Christian experience after I said the sinner's prayer was a sham? That the past fifteen-or-so years do not matter, and I need to say the sinner's prayer again, this time with more conviction (even though I did it with conviction the first time around)?

I then thought about a class that I took at Harvard Divinity School. It was with Arthur Dyck, and it was comparing the sermons of Joseph Butler with those of Jonathan Edwards, both of whom were Christian thinkers in the eighteenth century. Many of us know of Jonathan Edwards, particularly his hell-fire-and-brimstone sermon, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God." For Dr. Dyck's class, we were reading his Charity and Its Fruits, which was a collection of Edwards' sermons about I Corinthians 13, the love chapter. Like many of the Puritans, Edwards was interested in the question of how he could be sure he was part of the elect, the saved family of God. For him, he knew he was part of the elect if he was bearing Christian fruit, such as love for God and neighbor.

Butler, however, was different. "Saved" and "lost" were not really categories of interest to him. His preoccupation was more with whether a person is closer to or farther away from God. For Butler, we try to move towards God and become moral people by subjecting ourselves to positive influences: prayer, Bible reading, the worship of God in church, etc. And it's important for us to have what Dr. Dyck called "cool hours," periods in which we reflect on our lives. If David had done that, Butler asserted, then he wouldn't have gotten on the path of sleeping with Bathsheba and killing Uriah. David obviously wasn't taking moral stock of his life at that time!

I think that Paul resembles Edwards, whereas the synoptic Gospels are more like Butler. Paul treats salvation as something we enter. You're either saved or you're lost, a child of God or a child of the world, alive to sin or dead to sin, a member of the body of Christ or an outsider, a believer or an unbeliever, part of the kingdom of light or the kingdom of darkness. For Paul, you enter the family of God at a specific event, when you believe or are baptized. John is like this as well.

In the synoptic Gospels (except for passages in Acts, and perhaps elsewhere), it's more like this: God has a way that we should follow, which includes loving God and neighbor and trusting God. We should repent and try to live that way. When we screw up, we should come to God and receive forgiveness, something we need to do on a daily basis. But we should make sure that we're internalizing God's forgiveness of us by forgiving others. Otherwise, God's forgiveness of us will be revoked. It's not a matter of saying the sinner's prayer the right way or of dramatically exiting the family of God or of not being saved in the first place, but rather of following a path that includes love, God's forgiveness of us (presumably on account of Christ's blood), and our forgiveness of others.

My mind also goes back to a presentation that I gave at the Adventist Forum in New York. I was talking about my struggles with the "How do I know I am saved?" issue. I've discussed the topic here: Christians say I know I'm truly saved if I bear spiritual fruit (e.g., love, joy, peace, etc.), I look at my life and see deficiencies, so I despair. A lady asked me in the question-and-answer session, "Instead of focusing on whether or not you'll be in the good afterlife and escape hell, why not look instead at the issue of whether you're close to God or not?" That is a good point. Rather than obsessing over what category I'm in ("saved" or "lost"), why not look at how close I am to God? Do I truly receive God's love? Do I see others with love, as God sees me? Do I view myself as a sinner who needs God's continual mercy and forgiveness, and extend mercy to those who sin against me? In what ways can I walk God's path better?

C.S. Lewis probably believed that one becomes a Christian at a certain point (a moment of decision, or baptism, or whatever), for he says that the children of God will become like God. But there's a point in Mere Christianity where he sees the categories of "saved" and "lost," "Christian" and "non-Christian" as not particularly helpful, preferring instead to focus on closeness to God. In the chapter, "Nice People or New Men," he states the following:

They may demand not merely that each man's life should improve if he becomes a Christian: they may also demand before they believe in Christianity that they should see the whole world neatly divided into two camps -Christian and non-Christian-and that all the people in the first camp at any given moment should be obviously nicer than all the people in the second. This is unreasonable...[T]he situation in the actual world is much more complicated than that. The world does not consist of 100 per cent Christians and 100 per cent non-Christians. There are people (a great many of them) who are slowly ceasing to be Christians but who still call themselves by that name: some of them are clergymen. There are other people who are slowly becoming Christians though they do not yet call themselves so. There are people who do not accept the full Christian doctrine about Christ but who are so strongly attracted by Him that they are His in a much deeper sense than they themselves understand. There are people in other religions who are being led by God's secret influence to concentrate on those parts of their religion which are in agreement with Christianity, and who thus belong to Christ without knowing it. For example, a Buddhist of good will may be led to concentrate more and more on the Buddhist teaching about mercy and to leave in the background (though he might still say he believed) the Buddhist teaching on certain other points. Many of the good Pagans long before Christ's birth may have been in this position. And always, of course, there are a great many people who are just confused in mind and have a lot of inconsistent beliefs all jumbled up together. Consequently, it is not much use trying to make judgments about Christians and non-Christians in the mass. It is some use comparing cats and dogs, or even men and women, in the mass, because there one knows definitely which is which. Also, an animal does not turn (either slowly or suddenly) from a dog into a cat. But when we are comparing Christians in general with non-Christians in general, we are usually not thinking about real people whom we know at all, but only about two vague ideas which we have got from novels and newspapers. If you want to compare the bad Christian and the good Atheist, you must think about two real specimens whom you have actually met. Unless we come down to brass tacks in that way, we shall only be wasting time.