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Swimming the Bosporus 9: ‘Are You Saved?’
Moving around for the Navy and college meant I visited a lot of churches. My standard protocol was to slouch in the back row then flee the instant the service wrapped up. (Introverts unite! Better yet, go over there.) But the church ladies were onto me. Before I could reach the door, they would sidle up with small talk before closing with the classic evangelical question: “So, are you saved?”
You encounter this question constantly in American Protestant circles since it’s such a foundational doctrine. Heaven or hell. Turn or burn. Sanctify or french fry. And the path to salvation is pretty straightforward. Sincerely recite the Sinner’s Prayer and you’re in for good.
You can find all the Swimming the Bosporus posts here.
There are variations, but here’s the Billy Graham version:
Dear Lord Jesus, I know that I am a sinner, and I ask for Your forgiveness. I believe You died for my sins and rose from the dead. I turn from my sins and invite You to come into my heart and life. I want to trust and follow You as my Lord and Savior. In Your Name. Amen.
My “Born Again” story is dull. I attended an evangelical church at age 15, heard I needed to say the Sinner’s Prayer, and did it. Some of my friends had an emotional altar call and others exchanged a life of addiction for a life in Christ. But, basically, if you said this prayer and meant it, you were eternally saved.
After this, you should attend church, study the Bible, and grow in the faith. This process is called “sanctification.” If you lost your way, you could “rededicate” your life to the Lord and get back on the right track. (I think I did this a time or two at church retreats.)
For the nondenominational world, this simple formula strips away all the rituals and hoop-jumping you see in Catholicism and some mainline denominations. No need for catechism or confirmation; a preacher can lead you to salvation on a busy street corner or right on your TV.
This belief was stressed most my life so I didn’t have reason to doubt it. Over the years, though, it seemed odd that the Scriptures never mandated a sinner’s prayer. If saying it is the most important decision any human can make this side of eternity, you’d think Jesus or the Apostles would have made it crystal clear.
Instead, Protestant pastors and theologians studied the Bible, drew together several passages, and created the prayer as a sort of summary. But the Bible itself doesn’t always align with it.
I first noticed this reading Acts. A jailer asked Paul and Silas how he could be saved and they said, “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and you will be saved, you and your household.” The household of Cornelius was also saved through the ministrations of Peter.
Did each member of these households make a personal decision for Christ? The New Testament never mentions it. I also knew from history books that some rulers led their entire city or region to Christianity with a mass baptism. Were those people saved?
I brought up this issue of “corporate salvation” to smart evangelical friends and we couldn’t figure out a good answer.
Other passages began to stand out. One epistle states, “For we have become partakers of Christ if we hold the beginning of our confidence steadfast to the end,” while another says, “And let us not grow weary while doing good, for in due season we shall reap if we do not lose heart.” There are many similar teachings in the Gospels.
Being saved “if” you keep the faith is very different from “once saved, always saved.” However, I also saw plenty of Scriptures that seemed to back the evangelical view of eternal security. What troubled me is that a matter of such import wasn’t clearly spelled out for a dummy like me. I really didn’t want to get it wrong and wake up unsanctified and french-fried.
It’s important to note that Protestantism was a reaction to 16th-century Catholicism. Martin Luther, et al., thought Rome pushed salvation through works. The Reformers said works had nothing to do with it, rather it was faith alone. This is my severe simplification since entire libraries could be filled with books on the “faith vs. works” debate. I’ll leave the details to the experts.
But the Eastern Orthodox church never had this debate. “Faith vs. Works” began with St. Augustine in the Latin West, was further developed by Rome over the centuries, was rebutted by the Protestants, and continues to be argued across the West today.
The Orthodox position is (I’m simplifying again), If you have faith, you’re going to have works. Now that that’s settled, pick up your cross and let’s head up that mountain. Salvation is 100 percent a gift of God’s grace and there is nothing humans can do to “earn” it. But if you truly believe, good works are an integral part of living out your faith.
Even the concept of “salvation” is different for the East. The common evangelical understanding focuses almost exclusively on going to heaven or hell. It’s a binary; are you in or are you out? If you give your life to Christ, that instant is the place, date, and time you are saved. It’s done.
The Orthodox understanding is far broader.
Salvation is not a one-time event, but a lifelong process that begins here on Earth and continues into eternity. The Greek term is “theosis,” an unending process of becoming conformed to God. By participating in God’s work, we become more and more Christlike. This will continue in heaven.
Of course, no one can ever become God, the goal is to become more like Him day by day. Since we have free will, this requires our cooperation with God; a life of repentance and obedience. Faith and works aren’t an either/or but a both/and.
This understanding isn’t too far off from a phrase early reformers used: “We are justified by faith alone but not by a faith that is alone.”
So today, when someone asks me if I’m saved, I say, “I’m working out my salvation … with fear and trembling.”
Interestingly, the early Lutheran church reached out to Constantinople since they thought the Protestants and Orthodox must now be on the same page. But 500 years after the Great Schism, the two churches were speaking different languages, figuratively and literally.
So if you’re from a Western tradition and ask an Eastern Orthodox about faith vs. works or whether or not he’s “saved,” don’t be surprised if you get a blank stare. Or a 1,100-word reply trying to explain his answer.
Chapter 10 here.
This is ninth in the series “Swimming the Bosporus,” on my journey from the megachurch to the Orthodox Church. Installments every Sunday morning. Click here to see all the posts.
Published in Religion & Philosophy
To be fair – Orthodox Christianity makes absolutely no judgement here (was hoping to get around to this but I’m trying to do this while at work). We would not ever suggest that your hypothetical doctor was somehow damned – it’s beyond our ability to say.
To put it another way, it is common in Orthodoxy to say “No salvation outside of the Church”, and while we know where the Church IS, we cannot say where it is not.
And we also pray for the departed because of that – we are not capable of judging “this person was saved, but this one wasn’t.”
You do find some theologians like Origen or St. Gregory of Nyssa who even spoke in favor of there being some sort of universal salvation, even for ‘ole scratch himself, but this usually rejected (to be revived from time to time, the latest being David Bentley Hart).
That’s very interesting.
Soteriology (salvation theory) was always an issue for me. It always seemed like if God was just, fair and morally righteous, he would cut people some slack if they were a decent person but for whatever reason never accepted Jesus.
I realize that @arizonapatriot would say that even if we can’t “see” the justice in God’s ways, God is still just.
However, I wonder if people would really accept a God that was presented to them in such a way where God appeared to be a bad guy.
To be fair, we cannot really judge who is actually “decent”. Some examples.
You’re just arguing implausible hypotheticals. The creator of the universe would never be evil for doing what he wills with his creation.
None of those parables deal with the initial moment of salvation, but with looking towards the kingdom of Heaven.
To ramble a bit more here:
To take either your doctor or the Jewish victim of the Nazis, when it comes to Christianity itself – again we must withhold judgement because we have no way of knowing their own history. Suppose the Jewish woman’s only encounter with Christians was abusive? What if the Hindu doctor’s knowledge of Christianity came only through bad TV portrayals and awkward social encounters? I know of people who refuse to set foot in a church because their nominally “Christian” upbringing was terrible, and what “religion” they got was abusive. If that’s all they know of Christianity, how are we to possibly judge? Think of various sexual abuse scandals too.
CS Lewis, in both The Last Battle and The Great Divorce, conjectured that if people really came face to face with Christ, if not in this life but at the end of all things, they might find that He really was whom they sought elsewhere, and worshipped in their hearts, even if they didn’t know Him. I’ve known Muslims who have converted to Christianity not through any contact with Christians, but because of visions and dreams – Jesus sought them out.
It’s not for us to judge.
“All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”
I’m glad your Hindu doctor worked hard against cancer, but he still died guilty of idolatry. He has no entitlement to be with the God he ignored his whole life based on his own works.
Last ramble (for now, I think).
There is one Orthodox priest I know who came out of a very “hellfire and brimstone” upbringing, and burned himself out. He said God was always presented to him as “someone I could certainly fear, but never someone I could love.” He came from one of those fiery denominations where they heard all the time about God’s wrath, judgement, punishment, and so forth, such that Christ was presented as a sort of shield against that wrath – someone you could hide behind, but not someone you otherwise necessarily wanted to be around. I don’t know if I’d quite phrase it as presenting God as a “bad guy”, but it was certainly presenting God as someone ready to smite you at any moment, and for any infraction. It was a wonder to him to find that this was not at all what the early Christians taught or believed.
I asked earlier, but I’ll ask again: What is “salvation”?
It is true that in some situations one might think, “Yes, Mr. Smith helped a lot of people, but he cheated on his taxes too.” In some circumstances it might be difficult to say whether Mr. Smith did more harm than good, if he was “on balance” a decent person or “on balance” a not so good person.
But in the hypothetical case of Hitler accepting Jesus and moments later dying of a heart attack, some Christians have developed a salvation theory that would force them to say that Hitler goes to heaven and the Jewish woman who was tortured in one of Hitler’s concentration camps goes to hell.
That is the weakness in a salvation theory that is based on one accepting Jesus instead of one based on how one has lived ones life.
There might be some close calls, some moral conundrums/dilemmas, some biographies that would be hard to evaluate. But I think most people intuitively believe that the Jewish woman is more deserving of heaven than Hitler and that a God who sends Hitler to heaven and the Jewish woman to hell is a bad God. That said, many Christians think that a bad God is a contradiction because God, by definition, can not be bad.
If God actually conforms to goodness then one would wonder if God would really allow Hitler into heaven even if Hitler had accepted Jesus prior to a fatal heart attack while sending a Jewish woman who died in one of Hitler’s concentration camps to hell.
In other words, if God does bad things, doesn’t that make God bad? If God is not capable of doing bad things, then would not this preclude God from sending that Jewish woman to hell?
If there is a disconnect from our intuitive idea about what good actions are and what bad actions and the behaviors/actions that we presume God to be engaged in, then we are no longer thinking of God as being good. Instead we are merely thinking of God as powerful.
I appreciate that way of thinking.
What rubs people the wrong way isn’t the way you are presenting Christianity. It’s the way that many others have presented Christianity.
Some people who call themselves Christians will say, “Jesus is the only way to heaven. Everyone else burns in hell for all eternity.” Now, again, not all Christians say that this is the case. But when a Christian does say things like this, many people who are listening might come to one of a several conclusions:
[1] God is bad, not good. Why else would he allow a bad person, like Hitler, go to heaven merely because Hitler decided to accept Jesus moments prior to his fatal heart attack while allowing a nice, decent Jewish woman to burn in hell.
[2] God isn’t really like that. God would never let a nice, decent Jewish woman burn in hell for eternity. God isn’t a sadist. God is loving.
[3] This Christian doesn’t know what he is talking about. He is merely repeating what he has been told in seminary or in Bible study.
Sure. But let’s take someone who tortures, rapes and kills children. Then, while in prison, he accepts Jesus.
According to some Christians, that child rapist goes to heaven but the Hindu physician goes to hell.
Many people would intuitively view God, if God actually behaved the way that some Christians present him as behaving, as a bad God or perhaps not actually existing in the first place. In other words, if God is not capable of being bad/evil, then there is no way God could send a Hindu physician to hell while allowing a serial rapist of children into heaven.
If one’s sense of sin, salvation, and damnation is strictly juridical or even karmic, where good works are weighed against bad works, and if one has done enough “good” then one is let into a glorious afterlife, or if one has done enough “bad” then one is cast off into eternal torment (or even annihilation) then one would come to the sense that this difference in outcomes was unjust. This is, however, a truly works-based view.
But what is Heaven? What is Hell?
Where does that leave us? Many of the church fathers have suggested that in Eternity we will be faced with the presence of God himself, and whether that is eternal bliss or eternal torment is going to depend on whether we loved and served God or not, and whether we want to be in His presence or not, whether we choose to follow Christ or not.
In that regard, your comparison of the abuser vs. the doctor really puts the decision back on them. Did this abuser truly repent, and was he truly willing to stand before God in all his shame? Did the doctor, when faced with the Almighty, recognize that Christ was whom he worshipped in his heart, or had earthly worship before his idols been something else? Beyond our ability to judge, but God judges each person individually.
We do have two parables, however: The Prodigal Son (Luke 15), and the workers in the vineyard (Matthew 20). These are not about God’s power or judgment, but about God’s mercy, if we but swallow our pride and turn back. We have to repent, not to take pride in what good we did (or think we did), but to ask mercy for where we failed.
I’m wondering what you think it is.
Salvation is having your sins paid for by the atoning death of Christ and believing in that.
But that gets to the question of whether everyone has sinned and/or if we take on the sin of Adam and Eve. In other words, do we pay for the sins of our ancestors even if we have not committed any crimes ourselves.
I feel this is moot because I’m pretty certain no one is without sin.
And sin =/= crime.
Technically this is saying how you attain salvation, not what salvation actually is. But that being said, atonement is something foreign to Orthodoxy, and was to the early church too. There just is not a cognate of “atone” in biblical Greek or Hebrew – the word being translated into “atone” is one that is better translated as “covered over”.
To make amends or reparation – this is a legal concept. To suggest that sin is something requiring atonement is to say we can wrong God, and then need to “make it right” with God, as if we can somehow affect God. This is something that entered into Christian thinking rather late (Anselm of Canterbury is usually said to have been the first to formally express this around 1100). Orthodoxy Christianity has never ascribed to this, and has thus never understood the Crucifixion as a debt-payment – God repaying God. “Atone” is often used in English and other western translations, but it is not an accurate translation.
Father Stephen Freeman expresses is so much more clearly:
(cont)
(cont from above)
Father Freeman goes on to quote from Melito of Sardis, from a homily believed to have come from the mid 2nd century:
This is Salvation – the forgiveness for sins, the freedom from Death. This is also why the Orthodox Church teaches that salvation is a lifelong process, not a one-time event – Christ has opened the way, and we must follow. It is a relationship, and like every relationship it has a life and communion to it, and we struggle in that relationship until we draw our last breath.
The Orthodox Church does not teach of “Original Sin” but of Ancestral Sin. That is, we inherit mortality from Adam and Eve, but not guilty of what they did – we’re responsible for only our sins.
Sin is not an offense against God, nor a debt owed God, nor necessarily a crime, but is understood as a “missing of the mark” – like an archer missing his target, sometimes by a little, sometimes by a lot, sometimes deliberately aiming entirely in the wrong direction. It is a veering away from God.
But if we are only going to be held accountable for what we, individually, have done during our lives and not held accountable for what Adam and Eve did in the Garden of Eden, then we can move to the question of how strictly our behavior/actions should be judged.
Is it right for a powerful being (i.e. God) to torture someone in hell for eternity for the sin of getting angry?
At some point, if God acts like a jerk, why not be honest and call God a jerk? Even a powerful mafia leader can be a jerk, despite the fact that the mafia leader is powerful.
Why not have the guts to call a spade a spade? Call God a jerk if that is what he is like.
That said, maybe God isn’t a jerk in the way that many Christians present him to be. Maybe God isn’t going to roast all of the Jews in Hell for eternity. Maybe God is good.
You’re running right to a conclusion without really explaining how you got there, or whom you are rebutting.
And you call this sort of god a jerk. Well, yeah. That would be jerky. Also capricious and malevolent. But I’m not seeing anyone here claiming that merely getting angry one time (especially absent context) is somehow gonna doom them (Jesus got pretty miffed in the Temple, after all).
The point I was making is that if God behaved that way, and if one viewed God’s behavior as that of a jerk, than an honest person would say, “God is really a jerk for tossing that women into hell,” rather than, “What a mighty God we serve!”
I am making a distinction between a “being” that is good from one that is powerful.
Now, you have been consistent in arguing that we don’t really know if that Jewish woman will be tossed into hell for eternity. That’s not your understanding of Christianity. I understood that and I appreciate your point of view.
But other Christians I have run into have used “hell” and “God” as a weapon. They say, “You’d better believe what I tell you or you will roast in hell,” and “Yep. Jews will go to hell if they don’t accept Jesus.”
I realize that this isn’t your point of view.
Jonathan Edwards is kinda in that category. “Sinners in the hands of an angry God” is a classic of that conception.
Everybody (except Christ) has sinned.
The key question is: Does the punishment fit the transgression?
If we lived in a society where the punishment for driving 27 miles per hour when the speed limit was 25 miles per hour was torture and being stoned to death, we would call this unjust.
Do we have the honesty to make the same call if someone snake oil salesmen tries to tells us that God behaves this way towards us?