The Problem with Salvation as Process

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Continuing my thoughts from a previous entry on Historical Faith vs. Lively Faith…

The Reformation slogan that we are justified by faith alone is a stipulation about the special hermeneutical character of the gospel as a mode of discourse.

For the gospel to be gospel, to preach the gospel as gospel, it must be promise and not exhortation if it is to be an apocalyptic word from and existential encounter with the living God. Whereas historical faith treats Christ’s identity and the event of his incarnation as items of the past, lively faith is lively exactly because the gospel is the way God has elected to do address us.

Lively faith is the wound left behind by God’s self-disclosure in the word.Historical faith is the acquisition of information about God’s work and the addition of our own acts to it.

The distinction is necessary because the abuse that Luther et al sought to resist was the church speaking about the forgiveness of sins and justification to righteousness as though they depended on conditions controllable by us— as matters of law.

Thus, Robert Jenson argues:

“Discourse about Christ then becomes the provision of information, historical speech about him, lacking any unique existential function, a transfer from one head to another of information, which can be possessed without personal transformation.”

In other words, historical faith turns preaching into a data dump.

And indeed a great deal of “preaching” in the church today is the transfer of information. Instead of sermons, the church offers “teachings.” Rather than messages (kerygma), the church communicates “lessons.” Though Wisdom literature makes up very little of the canon, it is ubiquitous in the church.

The perniciousness of historical faith is that this information transfer and its correlative summons to respond on its basis is done as a process leading to salvation where a must happen for b to be possible and b must happen for c to be possible and so forth. Of course God will be credited as the primary protagonist of this process but, clearly, I must do something if I am not to be left out of the event of my own salvation.

Once again:

The difference between historical and living faiths is not between two responses to one message, but between the responses to two different messages:

“Christ died for the world, and now this is how you get into the result of his death”

Versus

“Christ died and now lives for you.”

The latter leaves you with no possible recourse but faith.

The former posits conditions that are precisely what the Reformers attacked, presenting a proclamation of Christ that itself turns into new exhortation and directs people back to their own fulfillment of— in themselves, necessary— moral and religious standards, to find therein the ground of their confidence in God.

Historical faith, posits salvation as a process where we are necessary counterparts to God.

Just so—

As common as it is to speak of salvation as a two-party process or a synergistic journey or a dance between partners, this is the gospel’s undoing.

As Jenson notes:

“If I understand my final relation to God as the outcome of a process which can at certain points stop if my contribution fails, and precisely if I am assured of God’s grace, that is, that his contribution can be relied upon, my contribution or its failure makes the whole difference in my life.”

My contribution or its failure makes the whole difference in my life.

That is—

If salvation is a process, then you are god.

Jenson observes that the Reformers rightly saw in historical faith (“Christ died for the world, and now this is how you get into the result of his death”) nothing but a choice of damnations:

“If the hearer remains unconcerned, that is, unbroken in his alienated assumption that the reasonable conditions of salvation process’s completion are in his control, spiritually empty works-righteousness is the result. If, alternatively, this teaching encounters a “troubled conscience,” it works damnation. If the law enters that realm of endlessly uncontrolled ambiguity called the heart and so demands not this or that civil work but love and hope, the hearer’s situation is desperate and can be saved only by promise.

For the heart’s law cannot be obeyed by one who in any way already is and knows himself a sinner: all lawlike talk “accuses his conscience and terrifies him,” and the flight from God thus imposed is the opposite of loving obedience, even when the flight takes the form of religiosity. If then the teachers of the Church bring no different kind of message from God, if also their talk about Christ is legal in its logic, all is lost.”

If the gospel is not gospel and all our speech about salvation in Christ is ultimately legal in its logic, then not only do we not have a gracious God but we are finally the gods in control of the process.

And we are fickle gods indeed.

(art: “Preacher Man” by Chris E.W. Green)

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