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Jesus Throws Everything Off Balance

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For some evangelicals, a great disappointment of heaven will be the shocking discovery that God has not read John Rawls.  Although it does not require strict equality of outcome, Rawls’s theory of justice as fairness presupposes that just ground rules are rooted in the free, rational self-interest of mutually contracting parties.  

So Rawlsian soteriology would work like this.  Before the foundation of the world, when me, God, and everyone else were establishing the rules of the “salvific contract,” we would agree to a set of principles that would fairly distribute eternal rewards and punishments, since, being behind Rawls’s imagined “veil of ignorance,” none of us (God included) ought to know exactly how things would turn out (e.g., in which religious tradition I might find myself).   

Of course, from a Christian perspective, the difficulty with Rawlsian soteriology is that salvation isn’t a matter of social contract.  Nevertheless, I cannot shake the sense that discomfort with the exclusivity of Christianity is more deeply shaped by applications of late-twentieth century, philosophical accounts of justice to Divine agency than by the witness of Scripture and the Christian tradition.  

In “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” Flannery O’Connor calls attention to the exclusivity of the Gospel through the actions and words of a murderous nihilist called “the Misfit.”  In the story’s climactic scene, the Misfit speaks frankly to his next victim – a self-centered grandmother whose half-hearted attachment to Christianity is rooted in its perceived socio-economic utility.  The Misfit: “Jesus thrown everything off balance.  If He did what He said, then it’s nothing for you to do but throw away everything and follow Him, and if He didn’t, then it’s nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you got left the best way you can – by killing somebody or burning down his house or doing some other meanness to him.”

Quite provocatively, the Misfit articulates the sense in which Jesus came not “to bring peace, but a sword” (Matthew 10:34).  Jesus Christ is the decisive and divisive One in human history precisely because there is no safe place, no middle ground.  As the Misfit understands, every human being must either “throw away everything and follow” Jesus Christ or run the other way.  There’s no other alternative, no neutral space.  In Rawlsian terms, there is no “original position” imagined or otherwise.  

Despite his hopeful inclusivism, C.S. Lewis himself – occasionally regarded as the patron saint of evangelicalism – could not deny the binary nature of salvation history.  In The Last Battle, Emeth is “saved” by Aslan, not Tash.  In Lewis’s Great Divorce, the figure of George MacDonald cautions with eschatological sobriety: “There are only two kinds of people in the end those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done,’ and those to whom God says, in the end, ‘Thy will be done’.”  If Jesus Christ has indeed “thrown everything off  balance,” it is difficult to see how a persistent, deliberate refusal to love and follow Him can, in the end, result in anything other than being on the “wrong” side of the divide beyond the stable door.  

Obviously, this raises the crucial issue of specifying precisely what loving and following Christ amounts to and what it means to be on the “wrong” side in the end.  With respect to the former, many evangelicals have regrettably reduced belief to mere cognition.  This has two unfortunate consequences.  First, if salvation is primarily a function of explicit intellectual apprehension and self-conscious affirmation of the requisite set of propositions, this renders the prospect of redemption unlikely, if not impossible, for a whole range of persons for whom Christ died (e.g., very young children, and the severely disabled).  Second, an over-emphasis on procuring justification by belief-as-transaction tends to minimize the centrality of faithful obedience (John 14:15).  Certainly, one cannot love and follow Christ while explicitly refusing to confess Him.  But perhaps, by grace through faith, one can begin to love and follow Christ without yet fully understanding that it is Christ whom one is loving and following.  Faith is, after all, God’s gift.  

The meaning of hell remains a thorn in the evangelical flesh.  Yet, as distasteful as the biblical imagery may seem to modern sensibilities, the real possibility of eschatological conscious punishment is inseparable from the Gospel that evangelicals profess.   To deny this possibility trivializes the wickedness of a persistent, deliberate refusal to love and follow the One who is at the heart of reality.  If O’Connor’s Misfit is right, we must either surrender or run away.  Either way, Christ’s gravity at the heart of reality is, having been “lifted up” (John 12:32), drawing all things to the consuming fire that He is.  Purification or consumption seems inescapable.  

Does this make evangelism of paramount importance?  Absolutely – provided that the telling does not outstrip the following.  For the urgency created by the traditional doctrine of hell together with the exclusivity of the Christian religion is not the rush to saturation by verbosity.  It is rather the slow, laborious task of gardening – of sowing, tending, and keeping – discipleship by faithful disciples.  The harvest is truly plentiful, but the laborers are few. 

The Gospel’s Inclusive Reach

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One of the highlights of my now eight-year career teaching in a seminary has been participating in several public dialogues with “liberal” (their choice of term) theologians from a nearby, mainline seminary. These events were billed as “evangelical-liberal dialogues,” with the intention of pursuing a path beyond an all-too-common gridlock. The topic was salvation and the question of the exclusivity of Jesus.

These frank but friendly discussions illuminated for me some differences between how “evangelical theologians” and “liberal theologians” work through the question of salvation and how we wrestle, in differing ways, with the Christian tradition’s claims to the ultimacy of Christ in a pluralistic and increasingly post-Christian context.  They also gave me appreciation for some points of contact and areas of overlap between us, even hints at a way forward.

On the differences, my liberal counterparts suggested that the mere fact of the plurality of religious perspectives and experiences forces on us a normative conclusion: any claims to exclusivity are nullified by the sheer reality of religious pluralism. One theologian suggested that religious commitment is like marriage. In marriage, one choses to commit or remain committed to a spouse; this is a deeply subjective and particularized phenomenon; a marriage is a unique, personal, and meaningful (hopefully) phenomenon. Analogously, then, religions function to provide unique, personal, and meaningful relationships with the divine. For some of us, Jesus is Lord. But Jesus is not everyone’s Lord. There are other—perhaps even equally valid—options. On the soteriology spectrum, my dialogue partner represented the pluralist position. Particular religions are historical instantiations of humanity’s varied, contextual experiences of “God.”

I don’t know of any evangelical theologians, however progressive on the spectrum one might be, affirming pluralism in this stark form. Evangelical theologians are not generally open to the idea of the intepretation of religion as equally valid windows divine reality. Evangelical Christians generally insist that the trinitarian God is the God who has been made known–albeit in diverse, unfolding, contextual ways–throughout the history of revelation and redemption. For evangelical theologians, anyone who is “saved” (united to God and redeemed from sin) is saved through and because of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. The question—and one that evangelical theologians seem increasingly open to considering—is whether conscious awareness and knowledge of Jesus and the Christian gospel is necessary to be positively and redemptively related to the one true God and Jesus Christ whom he has sent (Jn 17:3).

Exclusivists insist that explicit, conscious, and cognitive (even if minimal) knowledge of Jesus Christ is necessary for a person to be saved. If anyone does not possess this cognitive knowledge, they die without hope and are presumably eternally lost. This life is our “one shot,” to cite the motor-city poet.  

There are very few—if any—thoroughgoing, absolutely consistent exclusivists. Honest exclusivists recognize the challenge of the hard cases; this results in the granting of exceptions to the rule. What about Old Testament saints—presumably none of who knew about Jesus Christ in their lifetimes? What about the “man or woman on the island” who never had a chance to hear the gospel? What about infants who die? What about the mentally incapacitated—or victims of brain trauma? What about schizophrenics who can’t tell the “voice” of Jesus from that of Satan? What about victims of abuse who learned the “gospel” from their abusers?  What gospel do they actually have? What Jesus—and what gospel–do they know?

These hard cases suggest that “accidental” features of history and of situations outside one’s choosing ought not be the determining factor of one’s eternal destiny. Perhaps more importantly, they suggest that the gospel cannot be reduced to propositional truths, or to cognitive information, which becomes mere currency in an economic transaction (understanding and acceptance of the “gospel” as the price which purchases the product called salvation). And Jesus himself seemed to believe the gospel was not primarily about accepting cognitive propositions (Luke 4:18-19; Matt. 25:31-46; John 5:31-40), but about God’s grace of salvation, involving relational knowledge, which results in transformed lives and societies. 

As I see it, to be an exlusivist with exceptions is essentially to be an inclusivist. It seems, then, that we’re all (evangelical Christians) inclusivists. The question is how many exceptions one grants? How “wide” is God’s mercy? How accessible is God’s grace? But furthermore, the question is what kind of “knowledge” is involved in salvation? Is it primarily a cognitive, intellectual and propositional kind, or an existential, relational, and experiential kind (I suspect the “knowledge” of God involves both—but it is not up to any of us to determine with certainty who “has” it and what limitations God imposes—is there a “statute of limitations” for repentance, faith and forgiveness? Is this life—this history—our one shot?  

The gospel is by nature inclusive, because it is an invitation to the world (Jn 3:16). The fundamental flaw of those who resisted Jesus’ understanding of the kingdom is that they treated it as an exclusive message. Certain people, they insisted, were left out of the good news. Only the “elect” were privileged to receive it. Lesslie Newbign’s articulation of election (The Open Secret) seems spot on: election signified responsibility to bring the message of the gospel to the world; thus, election was for the purpose of the expansion of the kingdom and of salvation—not for the privilege of protecting it for oneself.

Scripture asserts that God desires that all be saved and come to knowledge of the truth; God’s patience is evidence of that (1 Tim 2:4; 2 Peter 3:9). If Scripture interprets Scripture, how can we not take this very seriously and let it penetrate our thinking and let it shape our theologies, our hope for humanity and creation? While it need not press us into a dogmatic, theological universalism (indeed: it could be the case that, for all of eternity, God will not get what God wants), it surely speaks to God’s intention for the gospel’s inclusive, expansive reach. Should we impose limits on that inclusivity or resist that expansiveness?

What seems indisputable from the perspective of evangelical Christianity is the centrality of the gospel as good news and of the uniqueness of Christ as the revelation of God in history. The exclusivity of Christ—in the sense of Christ’s irrefutable and irreducible uniqueness—actually highlights the gospel’s inclusive intentions. It is through the particularity of this individual person as the “icon” of God (Heb. 1:3) that God’s message of grace is disseminated to the world and that God’s project of reconciliation is funded. In my view, to emphasize claims to exclusivity as a boundary marker clearly delineating the kingdom, and then determining, on that basis, those who “belong,” is to miss the point of the gospel. Rather, evangelical Christians should let our conviction about Christ’s centrality as the revelation of God motivate us to share, live, and witness to the message of God’s reconciliation with humanity and promised redemption of the cosmos by extending Christ’s presence in the world—by being the “peace” of Christ in a violent world. We should reserve judgment regarding the eternal fate of any and every person completely and entirely up to God. Finally, we ought not be trying to convert people to evangelical Christianity. Rather, we ought to render witness by our lives, our love, our joy, and yes, by our words too, to Christ and the Spirit. In the spirit of John the Baptist, let us decrease, so that he might increase.  

In the end, the line that might separate evangelical Christians from “liberal” Christians is an insistence that the God we proclaim is truly the Lord, creator and potentially the redeemer of all. However, we might also recognize that conviction is not the same as epistemological certainty. The claims of Christianity are eschatologically verified. This should provide us both with the confidence to say we “believe” and the humility to insert a parenthesis: but we could be wrong. The balance of conviction and humility would create an evangelical Christianity that is capable of living peaceable with our neighbors as this pluralistic society pulses forward.