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The Bible is not about the saving of individuals for heaven, but about a new social and personal reality in the midst of this life.
A few years ago in a lecture, Archbishop Desmond Tutu quoted St. Augustine: “God without us will not, as we without God cannot.”21 The statement applies to both the personal and the social dimensions of salvation. Without us, without our response, God will not do it; and we, without God, cannot do it. Without us, without our response, God will not transform us or rescue us, either as individuals or societies. We without God cannot bring about transformation. But God without our response will not bring about transformation.
the biblical meaning of “repent” is not primarily contrition, but resolve. In the Hebrew Bible, to repent means primarily to return to God. Its metaphorical home is the exile. To repent means to return from exile, to reconnect with God, to walk the way in the wilderness that leads from Babylon to God.
In the New Testament, repentance continues to have the meaning it has in the Hebrew Bible. The gospel of and about Jesus sees repentance as following the way of Jesus.
repentance in the New Testament has an additional nuance of meaning. The Greek roots of the word combine to mean “go beyond the mind that you have.” Go beyond the mind that you have been given and have acquired. Go beyond the mind shaped by culture to the mind that you have “in Christ.”
Some Christians have believed that we’re all simply dead until the second coming of Jesus, the resurrection of all the dead, and judgment. This was the dominant belief for the first thousand years of Christianity. But around the year 1000, belief began to shift to judgment at the moment of death.
the majority of Christians throughout history have believed in at least three possible postdeath states: heaven, hell, and purgatory. Only Protestants, a small percentage of the Christians who have ever lived, have rejected purgatory.
I see no persuasive reason for thinking that one way of seeing the afterlife is the way it’s really going to be. Who could know? How can we know anything about it? The different visions cancel each other out, even as they also join in a symphony affirming a “moreness.” And the sense of a “More” is the ground of our hope, and even more of our trust. We live in God. We move in God. We have our being in God. And when we die, we do not die into nothingness; we die into God.
Salvation is “the dream of God.”23 It is a dream for the earth. And it is a dream for us. It is about being born again and about the Kingdom of God. Salvation is about the transformation of life, individually and together, here and now. And the Bible speaks of these two transformations as an experience now, and as a hope for history, and as a hope that leads beyond history.
Loving God means paying attention to God and to what God loves. The way we do this is through “practice.” As I have suggested throughout this book, Christianity is a “way,” a path, a way of life. Practice is about the living of the Christian way. And “practice” really should be thought of as plural: practice is about practices, the means by which we live the Christian life.
Christian practice is about walking with God, becoming kind, and doing justice. It is not about believing in God and being a good person; it is about how one becomes a good person through the practice of loving God.
