Continuing Diablogue about Salvation and Christianity

Last updated on: February 22, 2008 at 10:13 pm by James F. McGrath

Continuing Diablogue about Salvation and Christianity 2008-02-22T22:13:00-05:00 James F. McGrath

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This is a reply to some of the points Michael Halcomb made in responding to my previous post in this “blogalogue” (or is it “diablogue”?).

Michael wrote:

Paul is arguing that to trust in God is to trust in Jesus and Jesus only. It is not simply a social marker or some identity issue at hand—though these aspects are certainly a result of what’s going on.

First, to clarify, I would never assert that anything is simply social, but that does not mean that there is not in pretty much everything some social connection.

As for Paul’s discussion of “works of the Law”, I don’t see how it could be any clearer that Paul is talking about the works that defined Jewish identity and separated Jews from Gentiles. Presumably if he were talking in general about “good deeds” that one does “in an attempt to earn one’s salvation”, he wouldn’t have used circumcision as the “work of the Law” par excellence that he refers to. Not only do we know from Jewish literature in this time how circumcision was viewed, but it was also done to Jewish males (rather than by them) when they were a mere 8 days old. Even though it would have been an adult decision on the part of Gentiles in Galatia, this is still a rather odd choice of which work to focus on if Paul’s point was about self-righteousness and legalism.

As for the definition of trust in God is “trust in Jesus and Jesus only”, I don’t think even the Gospel of John goes quite that far. It does assert that one cannot have just the Father without the Son, but Michael’s statement goes even beyond that. At any rate, Paul doesn’t make such a claim, and his use of Abraham as an example makes it impossible to assume that he did. Saving faith, for Paul, is faith like Abraham’s. What Jesus has accomplished is to draw in Gentiles. The goal for Paul was to welcome in those previously excluded, without requiring of them the distinctive markers of Jewish identity such as circumcision. That many Jews responded negatively to this influx of Gentiles pained Paul greatly, but he was convinced that in the end this would merely provoke the Jews of his generation to jealousy, and all of them would come to salvation before the end came (Romans 11:25-32). Those who ignore Paul’s expectation of the imminent end (one more thing about which he turned out to be mistaken) leads some to understand Paul as envisaging the hardening and as a result damnation of multiple generations of Jews, with a mass conversion in the last days. But what Paul more likely envisaged was similar, but expected within his generation. That is why he never gave up his conviction that his message would turn out to be good news for Jews as well as Gentiles.

Michael also wrote:

It is fact that one must trust in Jesus alone for salvation

Let me simply state that the source of and basis for this assertion really needs to be clarified, and not simply taken as self evident, since in a very real sense this is the heart of the discussion. The question is not whether, from a Christian standpoint, God is understood to have reached out to humanity through the life of Jesus, but whether in doing so God has restricted access to grace so as to exclude people who were otherwise acceptable. In the Jewish Scriptures (the Christian Old Testament), Abraham (whose faith is the model for Christians, according to Paul) recognized the Canaanite priest-king Melchizedek to be a worshipper of the same God he himself worshipped, just under a slightly different name. In the New Testament, we find Paul depicted in echoes of Socrates in Acts 17, and in the Gospel of John, often understood to give clearest voice to exclusivism, we find the assertion that the Word that became flesh in and as the human life of Jesus was the light that illuminates every human being coming into the world.

I also wish to question the identification of religious experience as limited to speaking in tongues and other such specific phenomena. Nevertheless, it is evident that glossalalia, prophecy, and other such specific spiritual manifestations were an almost universal part of early Christian experience. To downplay this, I suggest, is to downplay parts of the New Testament that often make modern Christians who are not Charismatics or Pentecostals uncomfortable. And if there are no parts of the Bible that make one uncomfortable, then one is surely not reading it in all its diverse detail! Be that as it may, I had in mind the sort of life-changing conversion experience that gets one started in the life of faith, and not the phenomenon of spiritual gifts, which Paul acknowledges to be diverse and not universally experienced.

Is it appropriate to allow the faith and life-changing experience of an individual who does not fit one’s preconceived notions of “the saved” to change one’s views? Paul seems to have thought so: at the heart of his letter to the Galatians is the fact that they experienced the Spirit while uncircumcised. God had accepted them – who was Paul to object (Galatians 3:2-5)? It seems to me too easy to say one will “leave judgment up to God” and then carry on as though all those who are not Christians stand condemned. It is more in keeping with Paul’s argument to allow the evidence of a real experience of God akin to what Christians have experienced to challenge our assumptions and cause us to rethink our views.

I doubt Michael will agree with me on many of my points, and I hope we can focus on the meaning of specific passages in detail, since I agree with him that the meaning of texts is not “an anything goes type of game”. But, contrary to Michael’s assertion, I have not offered an interpretation of what Paul wrote that subsumes his argument under an imposed framework from the social sciences. Insights from the social sciences have certainly played their part, but no more so than in every case when an interpreter suggests that cultural and historical background is relevant to making sense of the text. Key Evangelical scholars like James D. G. Dunn and N. T. Wright understand Paul’s meaning when he refers to “works of the Law” in this way, and I am largely building on their work. This matter cannot be settled simply be dismissing the methods or the assumptions of the interpreter, but only by seeing who makes the best sense of the text.

Lest I be accused later of not having said this up front, the question of what Paul did or didn’t write is not the only consideration for me. Historically, Christians have arrived at conclusions using Scripture, tradition and reason. I do not define Christianity as believing or doing (to quote Ned Flanders) “everything the Bible says – even the stuff that contradicts the other stuff”. The Bible does not speak in only one way about the subject we are discussing. When we become aware of this diversity, we realize that we cannot simply reproduce the Bible’s affirmations, because they are themselves multiple. Instead, we must allow ourselves to be challenged by these diverse voices, while seeking to adopt the underlying approach that led them to their diverse conclusions in drawing our own, in our own very different historical setting.

Michael has replied here.

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