N.T. Wright's "Surprised by Hope": The Pirate Review, Intermission -- OR -- Salvation: N.T. Wright vs. Paris Reidhead's "Ten Shekels and a Shirt"
We've covered a lot of ground with Parts I and II of Surprised by Hope, and Part III is going to be the magnificent climax where all that has been leading, the "So What?" moment. So before I delve into it, I think this is a good place for a little intermission, where we might all ask ourselves how our own muddled views about the ultimate Christian hope, about salvation, have shaped our own personal stories, or are still doing so today.
For me, I've touched upon the subject in the first few pages of Chapter Three of my book, Parables of a Prodigal Son: The Theologically Grounded Testimony of an Ordinary Scoundrel. Having chronicled my 2-year abandonment of my family as a direct result of my then atheist/humanistic worldview, and my reconciliation with them as a direct result of God's grace as communicated to me in and through my wife, Chapter 3 starts with a brief description of the "muddled views" with which I began my new "born again" life. It goes something like this:
The story of the Prodigal’s family is rich with themes describing the kingdom of God. One feature that has historically been overlooked, and one which I recently began to appreciate, is its open ending. What happens to this family at the end of the parable? After a period of elation, the Prodigal must come to terms that he is back at the same place, with the same people, and the same tasks that led him to run away in the first place. He must face his older brother and attempt some form of reconciliation, despite no indication that the brother would have heeded his father’s loving admonitions. How would the Prodigal face his old neighbors who, given the historical-cultural setting of the story, would tend to side with the brother’s position over the father’s? In other words, having been saved, now what?
This is not a question many modern Christians ask themselves. The reason is because we have been told that salvation itself is the goal. Once you have “accepted Jesus into your heart,” you are thereby “justified by faith” (where “faith” means “belief”), and you are now “saved,” or “born again.” The Spirit will hereinafter guide your every move. Yes, you will falter sometimes, and God will inevitably pick you back up. But whatever else you do after you are “saved,” you will go to heaven when you die. And that’s the name of the game.
I once heard a preacher tell a group of young listeners that he was certain some people would enter heaven with a bottle of whiskey in one hand and a joint in the other. It’s not that I don’t believe it’s possible to enter heaven with a bottle of whiskey in one hand and a joint in the other, it’s just that if at any point in your life you’ve got a bottle of whiskey in one hand and a joint in the other, chances are pretty good that somewhere along the line you’ve missed the point of this whole thing, no matter what your eternal destination. This is the logical consequence of most Christians’ understanding of salvation, what Dietrich Bonhoeffer calls “cheap grace.”
A popular modern-day preacher ends his sermons on television by asking his viewers to join him in a warm and fuzzy prayer: “Jesus, I ask you to come into my heart…” (or something to that effect), concluding with the affirmation, “Friends, if you just prayed that little prayer, we believe you have been born again.” Translation: congratulations, you just bought your ticket to heaven. Go, try and live a good, holy life, and the Spirit will guide you. But in any event, the sooner you die, the better, because you are now a shoe-in for heaven, for eternal disembodied happiness.
And this was the view of salvation, of soteriology, that was sold to me as the Truth, as the Gospel. The “good news” was that once I believed, once I asked Jesus to come into my heart, I was "born again." I was going to heaven, or rather, escaping the hell that I deserved, that eternal justice demanded. So I did. One night in bed, as I was struggling to contain thoughts and images in my head that I knew did not belong there, I asked Jesus to come into my heart. The thoughts and images vanished. It worked! I was saved!! And I tried my best to live in faith, that is, in accordance with the belief that, given that I was now born again, my sins were forgiven and I would go to heaven when I died. It didn’t take long for me to realize there was something very wrong here.
If salvation was the goal, it was a very anticlimactic goal, at least from the perspective of life here on earth. Fine—I was saved and my postmortem eternity would be glorious, filled with love and praise to God and never-ending bliss. But down here on earth, I started to realize that the questions and struggles in which I was mired before “the escape” were still around. The same arguments, the same weaknesses, the same fears, the same doubts. I prayed and meditated daily about how I should now face these issues, but the fact that I was saved was a given. It was non-negotiable. The logical answer, therefore, was that life after salvation would be pretty similar to life before salvation, except with a change of perspective. The goal of this earthly life was not to make anything better down here, though that often happened as a little fringe benefit. The goal, salvation, had already been attained, and my job was to get as many others to that goal as I could. The means were irrelevant. This was my duty here on this vile earth before I went on my eternal vacation.
And there were hundreds of writers, teachers, and preachers who fed into this conception of the “now what?” question. I became particularly enamored with a popular old sermon by a preacher named Paris Reidhead called “Ten Shekels and a Shirt.” It is one of the two or three most downloaded sermons on the internet, hugely influential and extremely powerful. It is essentially a treatise on the message of Christianity as it stands in stark contrast against the secular philosophy of humanism, which Reidhead defines as “a philosophical statement that declares that ‘the end (or goal) of all being is the happiness of man.’” The sermon reaches its climax in the following testimony, which essentially summarizes the message of the entire sermon:
"If you'll ask me why I went to Africa, I'll tell you I went primarily to improve on the justice of God. I didn't think it was right for anybody to go to hell without a chance to be saved. So I went to give poor sinners a chance to go to heaven. Now I haven't put it in so many words, but if you'll analyze what I just told you, do you know what it is? Humanism. That I was simply using the provisions of Jesus Christ as a means to improve upon human conditions of suffering and misery. And when I got to Africa, I discovered that they weren’t poor, ignorant, little heathen running around in the woods looking for someone to tell them how to go to heaven. That they were monsters of iniquity!!! They were living in utter and total defiance of far more knowledge of God then I ever dreamed they had! They deserved hell! Because they utterly refused to walk in the light of their conscious, and the light of the law written upon their heart, and the testimony of nature, and the truth they knew! And when I found that out I assure you I was so angry with God that on one occasion in prayer I told Him it was a mighty… little thing He'd done, sending me out there to reach these people that were waiting to be told how to go to heaven, and when I got there I found out they knew about heaven and didn't want to go there, and that they loved their sin and wanted to stay in it. I went out there motivated by humanism. I'd seen pictures of lepers, I'd seen pictures of ulcers, I'd seen pictures of native funerals, and I didn't want my fellow human beings to suffer in hell eternally after such a miserable existence on earth. But it was there in Africa that God began to tear through the overlay of this humanism! And it was that day in my bedroom with the door locked that I wrestled with God. For here was I, coming to grips with the fact that the people I thought were ignorant and wanted to know how to go to heaven and were saying, 'Someone come and teach us', actually didn't want to take time to talk with me or anybody else. They had no interest in the Bible and no interest in Christ, and they loved their sin and wanted to continue in it. And I was to that place at that time where I felt the whole thing was a sham and a mockery, and I had been sold a bill of goods! And I wanted to come home.
And it was there alone in my bedroom as I faced God honestly with what my heart felt, it seemed to me I heard Him say, 'Yes, will not the Judge of all the earth do right? The heathen are lost. And they're going to go to hell, not because they haven't heard the gospel. They're going to go to hell because they are sinners, who love their sin! And because they deserve hell. But, I didn't send you out there for them. I didn't send you out there for their sakes. And I heard as clearly as I've ever heard, though it wasn't with physical voice but it was the echo of truth of the ages finding its way into an open heart. I heard God say to my heart that day something like this, 'I didn't send you to Africa for the sake of the heathen, I sent you to Africa for My sake. They deserved hell! But I love them!!! And I endured the agonies of hell for them!!! I didn't send you out there for them! I sent you out there for Me!!! Do I not deserve the reward of My suffering? Don't I deserve those for whom I died?'
And it reversed it all! It changed it all! It righted it all! I wasn't any longer working for Micah for tens shekels and a shirt, but I was serving the living God! I was there not for the sake of the heathen. I was there for the Savior that endured the agonies of hell for them, who didn't deserve it. But He deserved them, because He died for them.
Do you see? Let me epitomize, let me summarize. Christianity says, 'The end of all being is the glory of God.'"
Yes. The end of all being is the glory of God. That was it. That was the answer to the “now what?” question. The battle between the glory of God and the happiness of man. It had to be. Otherwise, how would we deal with these pesky little sinners that we were trying to save who seemed to want no part of such salvation? Answer: they deserved hell anyway, so don’t worry too much about it. You just go on trying to save them for “the glory of God.” Translation: it’s OK if you don’t love the sinners, because Jesus did and He died for them, and if you grit your teeth and try to deal with them, you are serving Him who is worthy of service, “not for the sake of the heathen, but for the Savior who endured the agonies of hell for them.”
Applying these principles to my own life, I came up with similar answers. Why was I sticking it out in my marriage when the same arguments and problems were daily permeating it? For the glory of God. Not for my love, per se, but for the love of Jesus that I could not possess (because He was God, and I wasn’t) yet through longsuffering and a change of perspective could implement. Not for my sake, or my wife’s, or my family’s, because none of us deserved it, but for Jesus’, who did. Human happiness was not the goal. Why would it be, given that our role as “humans” was so transient in relation to our ultimate role as disembodied spirits?
The problem with this view of Christianity, of the “now what?” question, apart from the fact that it is wholly and utterly unbiblical, is that “the heathen” have a tendency of sensing that you are viewing them as heathen. Someone once said that Jesus never ate with prostitutes and tax collectors. When people would confront him with biblical references saying that He did, He said, “Yes, but He never viewed them as prostitutes and tax collectors. He viewed them as people, as children of God.” Paris Reidhead didn’t view the Africans as people. He didn’t view them as children of God, but as potential children of God. And he did so both before and after his epiphany. The only change was in himself. He came to a realization that would allow him to tolerate the heathen, and the struggles and disappointments he felt in trying to save them. The goal was salvation. The goal is always salvation, not people.
My wife knew that this was my perspective. My daughter knew that this was my perspective. They could sense it in the tone of my voice. They could see it in my body language. I started to sense this fundamental error in my belief system from the strange fact that I could not communicate it to my wife during times of calm, but only during times of anger and strife. The summary of the perspective was “I don’t love you. But I know that Jesus does, and I’m only here for His glory.” That’s not something that someone who loves you wants to hear during tender moments. It’s an insult that you hurl at someone in times of anger.
The Gospel as an insult? No, that’s not the picture we get when we read the New Testament. Actually, it is so far removed from that picture that it is somewhat baffling how it has come to be so widely accepted. In the New Testament, people were “saved” from specific, life-destroying, image-of-God-erasing circumstances. The question about how that particular salvation would affect their eternal, postmortem destiny is rarely addressed. It’s not the point.
When John the Baptist sent a question to Jesus from prison, “Are you the One who is to come, or should we expect another?” Jesus responded: “Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them.” Where is heaven here? Where is the hereafter? These are the acts of salvation by “the One who is to come,” the One who is to be Israel’s savior, which are the very evidences that He is the One who is to come. The blind are not given access to heaven, they are made to see. The lame are not guaranteed eternal life, they are made to walk. The lepers are not saved from hell, they are saved from leprosy. So the question demands an answer. Having been saved from deafness, paralysis, leprosy, death, selfishness, depression, existential hopelessness, postmodern nihilism … now what do we do here on earth!?
It took me a long time to find the right answer to that question, and the rest of my book chronicles that quest. And if there was one voice out there that most helped me find the right answer, it was N.T. Wright.
Thank you, good bishop.
Grace and Peace to all this holiday weekend. I'm going off to spend a few beautiful days with my family, who no longer sense anything but love toward them from me. I'll be back on Tuesday to start tackling Part III of Surprised by Hope.
Raffi
I just had a long comment erased by my computer. Dang it.
I enjoyed this post. Insightful. Your analysis of the results of an improper understanding of the goal of salvation are appreciated. I don't think people have suspected how dangerous they are.
I also appreciated the testimony of your encounter with the glory of God theology. In my experience that comes from very Reformed circles and it's always been a turn off to me. Because of that I haven't had an inside view of it - so it was most interesting to read your thought process through it.
Alright, I'm posting this before I lose it....