Who is saved? A friendlier answer to a modern question?

Who is saved?

I propose we begin our consideration of this proposition by taking a closer look at a question that often comes up when we are considering our relationships with people of other religious traditions. The question we often, for whatever reason, feel compelled to ask and answer is the question, Who is saved? I am sure that almost all of you have seriously considered this question at some stage of your training and ministry, and that you all know the standard range of answers that are offered. The answers range from the “no one is saved” answer of the naturalists to the “everyone is saved” answer of the universalists. Scattered between these two end-of-the-spectrum answers are an array of answers ranging from Calvin’s predestination ¹ to Wesley’s super-soft arminianism ² to Barth’s hope-so universalism. ³ In addition to knowing the range of other theologians’ answers to the question, I imagine that each of you has developed a proclivity toward one or another of them, perhaps adding, subtracting, or modifying the rubrics that characterize that answer in order to make it your own. I myself have a preference that I will relate below. ⁴

Before I do that, however, I would like to suggest that the usual answers to the question Who is saved? are made by theologians using a traditional theological methodology—call it the theological point of view. ⁵ They are looking back at what the biblical writers wrote about the subject and systematizing those comments into what they hope is a consistent and coherent position. I dare say that most of our answers to this question adopt a similar method—we read the biblical texts and, taking them both singly and as a whole, develop an answer based upon them. In addition, we usually take into account the church tradition in which we locate ourselves and factor in the “official,” “orthodox” position as well. Yet the theological point of view invariably provides answers that are incomplete and that need to be augmented by answers that are developed using a different method, a different point of view. That additional point of view I am going to call the biblical writers’ point of view because it is similar to the way the biblical writers observed God’s world, interacted with other people, told their stories, and made their cases in the collection of 66 biblical writings that we hold to be sacred.

The biblical writer’s point of view consists of experiences we have of God’s world and the people in that world. When the biblical writers wrote they were rarely interpreting and systematizing texts already written. They were responding to their experiences of the world and how they saw God working in that world. They told stories of people they met in Palestine in the times before Christ, of places they’d been and events that happened to them. In that sense they were providing the primary material out of which the canonized Scriptures emerged. The theologians, then, are interpreters of the primary material—their writings are secondary. My suggestion is that when it comes to our relationships with people of other religious traditions, our point of view should primarily be primary. We should not be trying to fit the results of those friendships into a theological structure (at least not immediately); we should consider them fresh data out of which the ongoing narrative of the Kingdom of God continues to be told. ⁶

How does the biblical writer’s point of view work? Well, writers who adopt this point of view report on their experiences. They tell us what happened when they built the Tower of Babel, what King Herod said when approached by the Wise Men who were searching for the baby Jesus, how the crowds at Athens responded to Paul’s recitation of his extraordinary experiences of God. They are not trying to develop theories of Babel-building, political strategies of first-century kings, or psychological dynamics of Damascus Road experiences. They are telling stories, most often stories of how God was working in their lives. In so doing, they are providing us with a great deal of firsthand data, God-working-in-the-world data, that we can use first to understand what God is doing in establishing his kingdom on earth, and then to intuit how our gifts and our stories and our experiences fit together with all these other gifts, stories, and experiences of God at work.

I’m wondering if this isn’t the point of view most useful to us in processing our own experiences of interreligious relationships, particularly friendships? What if instead of predetermining the inadequacy of relational experiences, at least as truth claims, we accepted each and every one of them as a piece of data, incomplete and partial by itself but as an indispensable incident in the life of the Kingdom of God on earth. Like one small piece of a 1000-piece Christmas puzzle like the ones my family puts together on holiday weekends, each piece seems inconsequential—but without it the whole picture remains incomplete.

If analysis must be done (and we seem to be hardwired to do analysis), let it be done using a sort of calculus designed to measure a moving, changing thesis, or a Bayesian statistical method whereby conclusions are calculated constantly, changing with every new piece of evidence. ⁷ Only those types of analysis can hope to do justice to what amounts to an ongoing narrative, the story of what God has done, is doing, and will do as a result of His revelations through Jesus Christ, his son.

I am not for a minute suggesting that we replace our theologies with a collection of ad hoc experiences. We need theologies to look backward and sum up what we have learned about God thus far. We need Augustine and Aquinas and Luther and Calvin and Wesley and Barth and whatever new theologians emerge in the 2020s and 2030s and beyond. But I am suggesting that accounts for what is happening right now and what they suggest will happen in our futures. For those tasks, personal, everyday experiences are essential.

A modern question

Who is saved? is a valuable question when asked internally within the Christian community. It is an order-keeping question, helping us identify who we are and what we want and how we intend getting there.

Who is saved? is a terrible question when asked in the general population at large, a population made up of Christian and non-Christian religions and a-religions and anti-religions. In that setting it is an in-your-face challenge meant to demean and a question that has almost zero chance of missiological success, let alone as a witness to loving our neighbors as ourselves.

If out of some kind of dogmatic inertia we feel we must ask it in this global setting, we must at least have a friendlier answer. The question is meant to be definitive yet we are called to mere faithfulness; the question comes across as triumphalist yet we are called to love our neighbors as ourselves; asking Who is saved? is ineffective missiologically—we are called to be bringing in the sheaves not judging the wheat and the tares; in short, the question is conflict-producing instead of shalom-enhancing.

Actually, the content of the modern question, Who is saved? didn’t start out as a question. It started out as more of a cosmological theme during the Axial Age from the middle centuries of the first millennium BCE. During this time period we saw the birth of what are now known as the global, world religions—Hinduism and Buddhism in India, Confucianism and Taoism in China, and Judaism (and its eventual offshoots Christianity and Islam) in the Middle East. They all were characterized by a dualistic way of looking the world, a mundane, deeply flawed earth, and a transcendent perfection called heaven and/or nirvana. The individual’s religious task became soteriological, that is, getting from the flawed earth to the luminous heaven. ⁸

This task became reflected in many familiar New Testament texts such as John 3:16 and Romans 5:8. During New Testament times, soteriology moved from being an Axial Age topic of discussion to a kingdom of God promise—it was not quite yet the modern age question, Who is saved? In general terms, the question form of the Axial Age theme and the New Testament promise emerged with the Enlightenment. As a theme it created interesting theological discussions. And as promise it created corporate and individual hope. It only achieved interrogatory form when science and technology became our universally accepted rubrics for measuring truth. As a modern question it eventuated in arguments and admitted of only one correct answer; as a modern question it discounted the value of the relational; as a modern question it tended to ignore the reality of the eternal. Transcendence, along with feelings and narrative became the province of cranky mystics and story-loving historians. The answer to Who is saved? lost all connections to compassion and love and solidarity.

The movement of salvation from a universal assumption to a topic of discussion to a feature of cosmology to an Enlightenment question continues. It may be that we find ourselves today in between Who is saved? as a modern question and whatever form the question might take in a postmodern era. We are sufficiently suspicious of it as a question to acknowledge that the biblical texts seem to supply data in support of a range of answers. That is, one can make a biblical case for answers ranging from the naturalists “no” to the universalists’ shouted “yes” using biblical texts alone.

A friendlier answer?

I said earlier that I had developed my preferred answer to the question Who is saved? over the years and that I would tell you what it is. Well, here it is. I called my answer soteriological agnosticism, meaning that I did not think we humans know the answer to a question only God knows how to answer. For a long time I was convinced it was a friendlier answer to the question Who is saved? Friendlier than “no-one-is-saved” because it allowed that some of us might make it. And, really, it was friendlier than “everyone-is-saved” because it maintains some standards about who we get to sit next to in heaven.

I built my biblical justification for calling it soteriological agnosticism around the biblical verses that indicate eternal judgment is God’s alone—at least that is how I interpreted Matthew 7:1–5; Romans 14:4; and 1 Corinthians 4:5. I believed that soteriological judgments are God’s alone. I still believe that. But over time I came to question whether that phrase “soteriological agnosticism” really captured my position. My hesitations began when I read a bit about the history of the term “agnosticism,” its definition, and who has espoused it.

In the Western world, Thomas Huxley coined the word “agnostic” in 1869. ⁹ After it developed from an “ic” into an “ism,” philosopher William Rowe defined “agnosticism” as “the view that human reason is incapable of providing sufficient rational ground to justify either the belief that God exists or the belief that God does not exist.” ¹⁰ Strike one against the term—only fools really think that human reason is sufficient to understand the ways of God. And then I read a list of people who claimed to be agnostics—Charles Darwin, Thomas Huxley, Robert Ingersoll, William Stewart Ross, Bertrand Russell, Leslie Weatherhead—and frankly I didn’t like the company I was keeping. Strike two. And since the term was brand new, historically speaking, philosophically defined rather than religiously defined, and associated with some very shady characters, I realized I had struck out—strike three. I decided I needed a new way to describe my position.

After some heavy linguistic lifting, I decided upon the term soteriological limitism. I toyed with soteriological fallibility, and soteriological frailty, and soteriological liability, but in the end decided on limitism as being most adequate. And then, all of a sudden, I realized how silly this all was. I was spinning my theological wheels. I wasn’t making any progress. Actually, I wasn’t really answering the question, I was ducking it. And it dawned on me that I didn’t need a friendlier answer, I needed a friendlier question.

Friendlier questions

Deciding to change questions isn’t as radical as it might seem. We do it all the time. We do it because some questions turn out to be the wrong questions, or because they are too confrontative, or they are unanswerable, or out of date. In his helpful book The Achievement Habit, Bernard Roth says that whenever we find ourselves stuck on a problem, coming up with answer after answer none of which just don’t seem to fit, it is often because we are trying to solve the wrong problem. And one way to discover the right problem, is to try different questions. ¹¹

In trying to answer the question, Who is saved? the number of answers, nuanced answers, seem to grow daily and none of them seems to really fit. (As I said, my latest answer, for example, soteriological limitism, is really just a ducking of the question.) Perhaps we are trying to solve the wrong problem. One of the problems the question Who is saved? is designed to answer is this: “We don’t know who is saved and would like to know.” Is that really the problem we want to solve? Is that the problem we should be trying to solve? Is that the problem that God wants us to be working on? Perhaps not.

In trying to determine the real problem, let me suggest we need to consider three things. First, what is it about our relationships with people of other religions that has made this a primary issue, that has led, for example, to the American Society of Missiology to dedicate its 2018 annual meeting program to its consideration? I suggest that the biggest change is the frequency of contacts we have with people who have religious commitments different from our own. Most of us no longer grow up in homogenous religious hothouses; instead we meet Buddhists, Confucians, Hindus, Muslims, Mormons, New Agers on a daily basis. This is the biggest change in the past half century, the change that has made interreligious relationships a primary issue.

Second, once we acknowledge that the quantity of interreligious contacts has jumped exponentially, the question immediately arises about the quality of those relationships. Are those contacts in the main conflictual or friendly? Are people of other religions friends or foes? Should those relationships be conflictual or friendly? Should people of other religions be friends or foes? This is an important question that needs further research. My hypothesis is that whenever and wherever possible these should be friendly relationships with friends not foes.

And with that as a stipulation, allow me to suggest the third element of this issue, that is, is a friendship with a person of a non-Christian religion different from a friendship with a fellow Christian? Or, given, of course, individual differences, they are essentially the same? This is also an important question that needs addressing—my hypothesis is that they are essentially the same—a friendship is a friendship. In researching each of these last two points, I would consider one element of the equation essential, and that is that whatever we do in relationship to people of other religions, it must be done within the commitments we have to our own Christian faith. Although we could talk long and hard about what those commitments are in terms of content and attitude, I don’t believe the general principle would create much disagreement.

Given the above, I believe that the new question, the one that should replace the Who is saved? question, should be: How do interreligious friendships contribute to God’s Kingdom? To such a question, every interreligious friendship is a contributing answer, a piece of the puzzle depicting the mosaic of Christian life and living.

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One final comment supportive of adopting this new question: Recently I was rereading William James Varieties of Religious Experience and at the same time Charles Taylor’s Varieties of Religion Today, his take on what we can still learn from James’s century-old classic. ¹² Taylor believes that one of our enduring takeaways comes from one of James’s central points: That we can learn a great deal from an individual’s religious experience, that his or her experience is valid knowledge. This, Taylor avers, is an extraordinarily useful antidote to the scientism that runs wild in secular culture today. Scientists using the scientific method, Taylor notes, “assume there is only one road to truth: we put the hypotheses that appeal to us under severe tests and only those that survive are worthy of adoption. To put it dramatically,” he goes on, “we can win the right to believe a hypothesis only by first treating it with maximum suspicion and hostility.” James, Taylor notes, takes a diametrically opposed position. For him, there are “some domains in which truths will be hidden from us unless we go at least halfway toward them.” ¹³

I believe that one of those domains that James would apply this insight to is interreligious relationships. Although he doesn’t deal with the multifaith question that directly, at one point he does suggest that we consider this sample question: “Do you like me or not?” He comments, “If I am determined to test this question by adopting a stance of maximum distance and suspicion, the chances are that I will forfeit the chance of a positive answer.” ¹⁴

Why not apply James’s insights to our interactions with people of other religious traditions? Holding those relationships, however deep or shallow, to the hard-nosed scientific test implied by the question Who is saved? will create, in Taylor’s terms, maximum distance and suspicion. It is almost impossible that any kind of a positive, God-honoring relationship can come from such an approach. My suggestion is that in such relationships we go at least half way in accepting what this child of God has to say about his or her relationship to whatever transcendent person or principle they have learned to embrace. To paraphrase James, a relationship cannot come at all unless a preliminary faith exists in its coming. ¹⁵