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Overview
Salvation is the bedrock of our faith and the touchstone for faithful living. It is the good news of God drawing near to us as individuals but also as communities of faith. This book helps us understand that when we say "Jesus saves," we stand on scripture that proclaims a God who, through Jesus, heals, liberates, and rescues. Like each generation that has gone before, we too must find our own awareness and then respond and participate in God’s work as transformed people, serving together as the Body of Christ, who have also signed up for ongoing, personal and social transformation.
This book is an invitation to a journey of salvation oriented toward increased understanding but also to transformed commitments, renewed allegiances, and fresh practices. To address the grand narrative of Scripture in a way that takes seriously its essential focus on the journey of salvation is to open ourselves to fresh (and perhaps refreshed) perspectives on the world and, thus, on life in the world. In this book Joel Green show how salvation can illumine new categories for conceiving the world, for making sense of our experiences, and for directing our lives.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781426757051 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Abingdon Press |
| Publication date: | 02/18/2014 |
| Series: | Reframing New Testament Theology |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| File size: | 17 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Why Salvation?
By Joel B. Green
Abingdon Press
Copyright © 2013 Abingdon PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4267-5705-1
CHAPTER 1
Adam, What Have You Done?
The title of this chapter derives from a Jewish text written about 100 CE called 4 Ezra, a series of interactions between Ezra and God, or between Ezra and God's angel Uriel. Uriel has just revealed to Ezra the nature of rewards and punishments in the afterlife and announced that the end-time judgment is decisive—no more leniencies, no more offers of mercy, no more injustices. Aware of the ubiquity of sin, Ezra is appalled and responds, "It would have been better if the earth hadn't brought forth Adam, or when it had brought him forth, that it had forced him not to sin" (4 Ezra 7:116). He continues:
Adam, what have you done?! If you sinned, the downfall wasn't yours alone but also ours who are descended from you. What benefit is it to us that we are promised an immortal time, but we have done works that bring death? What good is it to us that everlasting hope has been predicted for us, but we have utterly failed? What good is it that safe and healthy dwelling places are reserved, but we have behaved badly? What good is it that the glory of the Most High will protect those who have conducted themselves decently, but we have conducted ourselves indecently? What good is it that paradise will be revealed, whose fruit remains uncorrupted, in which there is plenty and healing, but we won't enter it, for we have visited unseemly places? What good is it that the faces of those who practiced abstinence will shine brighter than stars when our faces are blacker than darkness? While we were alive and doing evil, we didn't think about what we would suffer after death. (7:118-126)
Written toward the end of the New Testament era, this Jewish text presents a telling interpretation of the human dilemma: God has purposed good things for humanity, but humanity will not experience those good things on account of the pervasiveness of sin. The first human, Adam himself, marks the downfall of all who descended from him. Adam is not the only culprit, however, since humans after Adam have "done works that bring death," "utterly failed," "behaved badly," "conducted ourselves indecently," and "visited unseemly places." As their conversation continues, Ezra is finally won over to Uriel's perspective so that his address to Israel in chapter 14 draws out the divine perspective for God's people. After rehearsing briefly the exodus story, Ezra proclaims, "If then you will rule your mind and instruct your heart, you will be kept alive, and after death you will attain mercy. Judgment comes after death, when we are restored to life, and then the names of the just will appear and the deeds of the wicked will be exposed" (14:34-35). The solution to Israel's plight, then is "to rule your mind and instruct your heart," that is, to keep Torah, "the Law of life" (14:30).
We can grant that evolutionary biology complicates the picture of human origins assumed by 4 Ezra and other similar, ancient texts. Chromosomal mapping suggests that men today share a common male ancestor who lived in Africa some 125,000 to 156,000 years ago, and women today share a common female ancestor who lived in Africa between 99,000 and 148,000 years ago. These findings also indicate that these two ancestors did not know each other and, in fact, were two of thousands of people alive at the time. The judgments of evolutionary biology do not undercut Ezra's basic concern, however. As work at the interface of theology and science has emphasized, we can and should take seriously the situation to which Ezra gives voice: All humans are unified in sin. Even if we can no longer claim that all human beings trace their parentage to a lone sinner at the beginning of the world, we can nonetheless recognize and grapple with both the inevitability and universality of sin. Things are not as they should be, and this sets the biblical and theological context for reflecting on salvation.
In this chapter, we begin our thinking about salvation, or soteriology (from the combination of two Greek terms: [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], soteria, "salvation" + [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], logos, "understanding"), by focusing on the need for salvation. We will first reflect theologically on the biblical story as a whole before turning more specifically to some New Testament voices. We will find agreement with Ezra regarding the inevitability and universality of sin, but disagreement with him concerning the answer to the human dilemma.
Beginning at the Beginning
Simply put, "salvation" is the comprehensive term for all of the benefits that are graciously bestowed on humans by God. This definition focuses on two poles: God as the benefactor and humanity—and, indeed, the whole of creation—as the beneficiary of God's good gifts. Our primary concern in this chapter is with the human situation. What it means "to be saved," to be engaged in propagating and embodying the message of salvation, and to make one's way on the journey of salvation—these questions are tied to the larger question of what it means to be human. And, of course, even asking whether we need salvation presumes an understanding of what it means to be human. What is our call or vocation simply because we are members of the human family?
We should not be surprised by this emphasis on the anthropological focus of salvation, but neither should we exaggerate it. The initial account of creation in Genesis 1 reaches its crest in the creation of humankind. In the initial recounting of God's work on each day of creation, the narrator has employed a consistent literary pattern:
1. Introduction: "God said ..."
2. Command: "Let there be ..."
3. Report: "And that's what happened."
4. Evaluation: "God saw how good it was."
5. Time Marker: "There was evening and there was morning ..."
Following this sequence of events, the light, the sea, the sky, vegetation, and eventually "every kind of living thing" appear on days one to five. Orderly creation comes into being in an orderly fashion. That the work of creation reaches the height of its crescendo in the creation of humanity is signaled not only by its being reserved for the sixth and final day but also by the narrator's departure from the orderly cadence he has established. The work of this day is not just "good," but "supremely good" (Gen 1:31).
Similarly, in Psalm 8, a psalm that extols human dignity in the context of divine glory, the psalmist claims of human beings,
You've made them only slightly less than divine, crowning them with glory and grandeur. You've let them rule over your handiwork, putting everything under their feet— all sheep and all cattle, the wild animals too, the birds in the sky, the fish of the ocean, everything that travels the pathways of the sea. Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name throughout the earth! (Ps 8:5-9)
On the one hand, this psalm, which serves as a kind of commentary on Genesis 1, sharply contrasts God's majesty with human insignificance. The psalmist expresses bafflement that Yahweh's splendor does not completely overshadow the possibility of his attending to mere earthlings: "What are human beings that you think about them; what are human beings that you pay attention to them?" (Ps 8:4). On the other hand, the psalmist recognizes that the human family finds its true identity only in relation to God and in relation to God's creation. Moreover, in a world that marked differences between royalty and commoners on the basis of family lineage (the accidents of birth, so to speak), Psalm 8 attributes nobility to every person. The prominent place of humankind in relation to the rest of creation is accentuated at the same time that human beings are positioned clearly in relation to God and the heavenly council. Even the nobility of humanity is cause for glorifying God.
Although these texts provide good reason for a soteriology focused on humanity, there is more to the story. From the standpoint of the biological sciences, the identity of human beings with other mammals, and indeed with all other animals and the whole creation, has become more and more evident in the past two or three centuries. This scientific analysis is not alien to the accounts of creation in the Bible, for there too the human creature is depicted very much at home in the cosmos. Humans are situated in relation to other living creatures in almost every way, so that the fate of the one is tied to the fate of the other. In the New Testament, Paul presumes this relationship in his portrait of the consummation of history, insisting that the restoration of all creation is intimately linked to the salvation of God's people:
The whole creation waits breathless with anticipation for the revelation of God's sons and daughters. Creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice—it was the choice of the one who subjected it—but in the hope that the creation itself will be set free from slavery to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of God's children. (Rom 8:19-21)
And the book of Revelation cannot imagine the final deliverance of God's people without at the same time envisioning cosmic restoration: "a new heaven and a new earth" (Rev 21:1).
As important as it is that we account for the cosmological scope of God's salvation, it remains nonetheless true that the focal point of the mural of salvation painted by the biblical writers is occupied by humankind. Theologically, this is the consequence of what distinguishes the human creature from all other creatures. Evolutionary biology, which might be thought to emphasize more the sameness of homo sapiens in relation to other animals, nonetheless allows for difference. From the perspective of the natural sciences, the distinguishing marks of the human person would include at least the following: the development of consciousness; the capacity for human relatedness, including individuality within community and the ability to consider the likely feelings and thoughts of others; self-consciousness; and the capacity to make decisions on the basis of self-deliberation and assessment of the possible outcomes of the options considered, to plan and take action on the basis of those decisions, and to take responsibility for those decisions and actions. Biologist Francisco J. Ayala summarizes the defining elements of the human family with reference to the human capacity for ethics—referring not to a particular ethical schema, but rather to "the proclivity to judge human actions as either good or evil"; cognitive scientist Warren S. Brown highlights the human capacity for and experience of rich, textured forms of personal relatedness. As Brown makes clear, however, such qualities as I have listed are not distinctive of the human family, as though no such qualities were to be found among nonhuman animals. It is, rather, that these capacities are present in the human family in ways that significantly exceed what is found among nonhuman species. From the perspective of the Genesis account, human distinctiveness is charted in terms of the creation of humankind in the image of God, human "dominion" in relation to the rest of the world, and the call to obey God.
Humanity in Contemporary Perspective
How do we come to terms with a scriptural portrait of the human person? The first obstacle we face is that we already possess views of personhood or the self. Our assumptions about what it means to be human are often unacknowledged and are therefore taken for granted simply as the way things are. Accordingly, it is easy to find in the Bible reflections of our own views, particularly if we are unaware that they are just that, our own views.
For this reason, it may be helpful to describe first how many of us have learned to construct what it means to be human. In his penetrating analysis of contemporary human identity in the West, philosopher Charles Taylor finds that personal identity has come to be based on presumed affirmations of the human subject as autonomous, disengaged, self-sufficient, and self-engaged. It is true, of course, that Taylor's findings are more telling for some parts of the population than others; some of us come from more community-oriented subcultures. Joe M. Kapolyo reflects on what it means to be human from an African perspective, for example, and Ismael Garcia writes from a Hispanic context, and both lean toward priorities less interested in dividing an individual into social, physical, or spiritual "parts" and more concerned with life as an undivided unity; less concerned with thinking about human nature one person at a time and more concerned with communality, interdependence, and participation. At the same time, we should observe that the cultural forces Taylor describes are powerful ones, so much so that even community-based peoples may find their numbers infiltrated, however slowly, by these alien norms.
For Taylor, the development of this account of personal identity in the West can be traced from Augustine in the fourth to fifth centuries, through the major European philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (e.g., Descartes, Locke, and Kant), into the present. What he finds is a "self defined by the powers of disengaged reason—with its associated ideals of self-responsible freedom and dignity—of self-exploration, and of personal commitment." These provide a launching point for our modern conception of "inwardness." Modern identity is thus shaped by such assumptions as the following:
• human dignity lies in self-sufficiency and self-determination
• identity is grasped in self-referential terms: I am who I am
• persons have an inner self, which is the authentic self
• basic to authentic personhood are self-autonomy and self-legislation
The upshot of this is a portrait of the human person that can be understood, as it were, one person at a time, with an individual's interior life of cardinal importance.
Although Taylor does not major much on the idea of a human "soul," it is nonetheless interesting that the view of human identity he sketches is one cultivated easily in the metaphysical garden of a Plato or a Descartes. Taylor does identify the precondition for the modern emphasis on the human sense of the "authentic, inner person" in Plato's concept of the "soul" ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], psyche), however, and the Christian tradition has tended to agree.
Given this portrait of humanity, how might "salvation" be understood? Perhaps it is not surprising that views of the human person like these have tended to emphasize the personal decisions of individuals and to center on transformation of the "inner person." Consider the famous and influential definition of "conversion" put forward by William James:
To be converted, to be regenerated, to receive grace, to experience religion, to gain an assurance, are so many phrases which denote the process, gradual or sudden, by which a self hitherto divided, and consciously wrong inferior and unhappy, becomes unified and consciously right superior and happy, in consequence of its firmer hold upon religious realities. This at least is what conversion signifies in general terms, whether or not we believe that a direct divine operation is needed to bring such a moral change about.
Salvation, then, is the resolution of a person's inner, subjective crisis—with its emphasis on individual experience rather than corporate life (or people in relation to all of creation), just as the locus of religion is a feeling-based, interior experience. Following James, A. D. Nock's classic study of conversion reaches a similar conclusion: "By conversion we mean the reorientation of the soul of an individual, his deliberate turning from indifferent or from an earlier form of piety to another, a turning which involves a consciousness that a great change is involved, that the old was wrong and the new is right." Nock goes on to write of "a passion of willingness and acquiescence, which removes the feeling of anxiety, a sense of perceiving truths not known before, a sense of clean and beautiful newness within and without and an ecstasy of happiness." What is needed in this case is a "change of heart." According to Francis Crick, who together with James Watson is responsible for deciphering the structure of DNA a half century ago, these ideas are focused in a religious belief held today by billions of human beings. As we shall now see, though, there is little about this portrait of the human person, or the soteriology that it underwrites, that is particularly biblical.
What Is Humanity?
Recall the words about humanity in Genesis 1–2:
God created humanity in God's own image, in the divine image God created them, male and female God created them. God blessed them and said to them, "Be fertile and multiply; fill the earth and master it. Take charge of the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, and everything crawling on the ground." Then God said, "I now give to you all the plants on the earth that yield seeds and all the trees whose fruit produces its seeds within it. These will be your food. To all wildlife, to all the birds of the sky, and to everything crawling on the ground—to everything that breathes—I give all the green grasses for food." And that's what happened. God saw everything he had made: it was supremely good. There was evening and there was morning: the sixth day. (1:27-31)
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Why Salvation? by Joel B. Green. Copyright © 2013 Abingdon Press. Excerpted by permission of Abingdon Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Foreword,Abbreviations,
Introduction,
Chapter 1 Adam, What Have You Done?,
Chapter 2 Yahweh, the Healer,
Chapter 3 Yahweh, the Liberator,
Chapter 4 How Can We Be Saved?,
Chapter 5 The End of Salvation,
Notes,
Bibliography,
Index of Scriptures,
Index of Modern Authors,
Index of Subjects,