dominion through that one, much more surely will those who receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness exercise dominion in life through the one man, Jesus Christ. (Rom 5:15, 17)
Note that Paul uses the more passive "receive" (lambano) rather than the more active "decide" or "choose," stressing the work of Christ rather than our decision. When asked, "Where were you saved?" Barth replied, "On Golgotha."
To glory in salvation as a possession, to boast of it as something achieved and now owned, is to show that one is fundamentally confused.
C. S. Lewis speaks of his conversion to Christ as an act that God worked in him that was almost coercive in its effect, that time when "God closed in on me" and he came to the cross as "a prodigal who is brought in kicking, struggling, resentful, and darting his eyes in every direction as a chance for escape." 3
ETERNAL LIFE
It is this miraculous, gifted quality of salvation that is lacking in popular pagan views of death and the afterlife. Most people I know believe in the "immortality of the soul"—there is in us a divine spark that goes on and on even after our physical death. That's Plato, not Paul. Greeks like Plato taught that human beings possess an immortal, imperishable "soul" that goes on, in some shadowy sense, beyond the ravages of physical death.
"I believe that my daughter has now become the rain, the wind moving in the trees, the stars that shine in the night," said a woman to me after her daughter died of leukemia. I'm sure that her notion of immortality was comforting to the grieving mother. And yet, I feared that it would ultimately turn out to be false comfort. First, it seemed to me a sad denial of the horror and the tragedy of a young woman's death. Wind moving through the trees is small potatoes compared with a living, breathing, loving, adorable person. Paul said that death is hated, the "final enemy" (1 Cor 15:26), and I believe him right. Second, wind moving through the trees is leftover small change compared with the treasure of a distinct, embodied, personality whom we have known and loved, loved not so much for her general humanity, but loved personally in her delightful particularity. I feared that this grieving mother was settling for too little. But mine is a point of view prejudiced by Christian salvation.
Christians believe that nothing about us is eternal. As X. J. Kennedy's poetic, washed-out whore says, "For when Time takes you out for a spin in his car / You'll be hard-pressed to keep him from going too far."4 When we die, we die. We don't just appear to be snuffed out, then to sail forth into some vague metaphysical, shadowy state. We return to the dust from which we came. Tears and wailing are appropriate responses from loved ones when the sting of death strikes their beloved. And yet, in a spectacular miracle of God, the same God who raised dead Jesus somehow reaches in, defeats the enemy death, and takes us along as well. Jesus was resurrected into some new "body" whereby he appeared to his disciples in his resurrected state. It was a very different body—he could walk through doors, appear and disappear to his disciples. They did not readily recognize him in his resurrected body but still, after a few bodily acts—like touching him and eating with him—they recognized him as the same Jesus whom they loved, followed, and at times disobeyed, although he was Jesus in a wonderfully different form. Yet there is even more. The bold claim of his disciples was not only that Jesus was raised, but he promised to reach in and resurrect them as well. "Because I live," said Jesus, "you'll live too." So John Calvin spoke of our reconciliation to God as "vivification," restored to God, we are vivified.
Immortality is attractive because it acts as if eternality is something that we possess as human beings. Resurrection is humbling because it is pure gift to utterly mortal beings like us. Immortality usually assumes continuity in the next life with this life—if we enjoyed rose gardening in this life, we'll get to garden in the next. Resurrection promises a whole new world, a radical discontinuity with the pain and frustration of life in this world, discontinuity that occurs because we are now near God in a healed, restored, wonderfully refashioned world.
Why does my church talk so little about salvation? We preachers speak before people who neither conceive of themselves as dying down in the ditch nor know a God who is able to stoop, a God who not only loves to heal, but loves even to raise the dead. Able to solve most of our real problems by ourselves, fairly well off and well fixed, working out regularly and watching our diets, we come to church only for helpful suggestions for saving ourselves. As Jesus would have said of someone in our circumstances, "You've already had your reward" (Luke 16:9-18).
I'm reminded of that dramatic moment in the Exodus when Moses tells Israel "stand firm, and see the deliverance that the LORD will accomplish" (Exod 14:13). "Thus the LORD saved Israel that day" (14:30). Note that all that is required of us is to stand and to see. The rest is God's. God forbid that this book be written or read as just another of our salvation projects. Better that these pages be part of our standing, seeing, and adoring the salvation of the Lord.
God may be pro nobis, for us, but God is also extra nos, outside us. Whether we know it, like it, respond to it or not, something has occurred in Jesus Christ that is not determined by us nor limited by the boundaries of our imagination. We must not make the effectiveness of God's work on the cross and in the Resurrection contingent on human responsiveness. The reality of salvation by Christ precedes any human possibility of salvation in Christ. Redemption is an accomplished fact, pro nobis. But God's determination fully to have us and completely to love us makes this an event also in nobis. Though reconciliation with God is a gift of God, it has yet to be fully accomplished until God gets all that God wants—to have us, all of us, in communion. Salvation is the good news, "Become who, by the grace of God, you really are" rather than the bad news, "Try hard to be someone who, with enough strenuous spiritual effort, you might eventually be."
Thus there is a finished and completed quality about the work of God on the cross. Yet by the grace of God, there is "more and even more" as well, as we find ourselves drawn daily into the sphere of such love, as we grow in our ability to return some of the love that has so completely, fully loved us. Salvation is not a project to be done by us but a gift to be received by us. Gratitude, responsiveness becomes a fundamental motif of the Christian life. Although our "yes" does not accomplish our salvation, our little yes is given a place in the fulfillment of God's great "Yes!" to us in the cross and resurrection of Christ. And the Wesleyan in me suspects that our "yes" will rarely be a one-time, once and for all "yes."
God's love desires not only our assent but also our participation. Jesus doesn't just want us to adore him but to follow him. We are told by Jesus that we are to take up his cross daily (Luke 9:23). Every day we must wake up, jump out of bed, and be surprised by the scope of our salvation in Christ. Our "yes" thus becomes "yes" again-and-again, more-and-more as we grow in grace. As Barth said, we are all "amateurs" when it comes to our faith in Christ. We keep having these fine moments of recognition and recognition in which we once again are "surprised by joy" (C. S. Lewis). In the Lord's Prayer, note that we again and again, as if for the first time, ask God for the gift of our daily bread.
The smug "I'm saved, how about you?" betrays the grace of God as a daily, ongoing, continually awakening, and surprising gift of emergent awareness. We are saved by the completed work of Christ, yet it is also true that we are graciously, moment-by-moment being saved. We thus may joyfully anticipate that time, that place when we shall be fully "saved," closer to the heart of God than we ever dreamed or dared imagine. Paul says that he, and indeed the whole creation, is "groaning" in agony for such complete redemption (Rom 8:22).
If you've never known what it's like to be offered the gift of love by another person, I'm too poor a poet to describe it for you. But if you have been so loved, you'll know what the church is pointing to when it describes the grace of God as unmerited, life-giving, life-transforming gift, almost like the eros of two adolescents.
The church has always struggled to interact divine initiative (God's
