To any who reads.
I am going to start off by saying that I am new to OST, so I apologize if I don’t understand how things work around here. Please forgive me.
Now, if anyone read my title, you realized that I am posting about the concept of salvation in a pluralistic religious world. I have looked through this site and noticed that there are many conversations on hell, revelation, eschatology, and evangelism. So i hope this topic isn’t rehashing anything already out there, but I want to know other people’s views on this subject. I am going to post some questions for somewhat of a structure to this thread. Please do not feel that these questions have to be answered exactly. Look at them more as a reference.
1. Do people have to "hear" the gospel (preaching-evangelism) in order to be "saved"?
2. If those of other religions are living "righteous" lives (ex. buddist monks) are they truely to be outcast into the "fires of hell" because they did not recieve or say the "sinners prayer"? (this can also be taken as a socio-cultural statement. How difficult would it be to hear of a new path, that puts your faith, what you have always thought as the truth, and is interwoven in with your ethnicity and culture, into question).
3. Is God’s grace to short to extend to all in this life or in the next? Can those who don’t hear or understand be "saved" after they die? (ex. C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce)
I hope that this is a good start. Though I think that I should note that I believe that God’s grace and salvation is available to all, and is through Christ. If I had to postition myself with terminology i would say i am more of an inclusivist. Just to let you all know where I think I am standing presently.
Please feel free to expound any of these questions or add anything you feel needs to be said. Let me know what you think. Again this post is just to start conversation, I know that this subject can be very complicated, and that is why I chose such a brief and general introduction.
Salvation and inclusivism
Brent, thanks for posting. It’s an important question, one that we need to keep asking. Different people will inevitably approach it in different ways so I can only really give my own personal (and rather limited) response. There have been a number of discussions on the theme of salvation on Open Source Theology: try this link.
I think we should have the utmost respect for righteous and devout people who do not call themselves Christians.
I do not think that we find in the Bible a doctrine of hell as a place of protracted conscious suffering after death. The discussion of Brian McLaren’s book about hell explored these questions at some length. In simple terms I believe that the dead will be raised for a final judgment on the basis of what they have done and if their names are not found written in the book of life, they will be destroyed in the lake of fire, which is an image for utter destruction, a second death.
I regard it as at best unhelpful to keeping posing the fundamental question of faith in terms of being saved, getting to heaven, avoiding the fires of hell. If we make this central, we end up with an individualistic faith oriented towards a reward beyond this world. The biblical narrative, in fact, has a much more worldly orientation. The primary doctrine is not individual salvation but corporate election: God has chosen an unremarkable and often profoundly inadequate people to be a royal priesthood in the world, a community that mediates the presence of God for others. Sometimes this community needs saving - from persecution, from the consequences of its own folly, from God’s judgment. And I think we have the assurance that this imperfect community will one day live in the presence of God in a new creation. But I would argue that salvation is not an end in itself - it is a means to the end of ensuring the well-being and effectiveness of the people of God.
This does not directly answer your question, but to my mind at least it sets it within a more useful and more realistic theological framework. Looked at this way, I would suggest that the argument about inclusivism misses the point. Biblically, the covenant community is very clearly demarcated: it is Christ’s blood that seals the new covenant, baptism marks the commitment we make to abandon the old self and take upon ourselves the mission of God, and the Spirit of God is a ‘holy’ Spirit, distinct from other spirits abroad in the world. But if this amounts to a blessing, it is blessing for the sake of others, and this ‘for the sake of others’ must be utterly inclusive and unconditional. In the end, I believe that I am called by the one God, a God of grace, to live for him and for others.
Another take on The Great Divorce
Thanks for this post, Brent. I want to pick up on question 3 - about the possibility of grace extending beyond this life. Jurgen Moltmann makes a fascinating point about the Greek icons of The Harrowing of Hell, where Jesus is depicted leading a triumphal procession out of hell. His point (at least, as I took it to be!) is that the love of God in Jesus Christ refuses to be shut off or out by human refusal and continues as offer and invitation.
I read Good Friday as being the full and final human "No" to God that begins in the story of the Garden. Taking the parable of the vineyard owner, it seems to me that the crucifixion of Jesus (God incarnate) is our final refusal of God. Our world has no place for God. That is the significance of the crucifixion. Jesus weeps over Jerusalem because the inhabitants did not recognise their kairos - the time of God’s visitation. God visits, with a "final offer" and our "final word" is No. The death of Jesus is the nadir of human hope. It leaves us Godforsaken - by human choice.
Resurrection is God’s "final word". Out of the ashes of the death of everything - all hope, promise and possibility of salvation - God raises Jesus from the dead. Death is the telos of sin because it represents the ultimacy of human rejectoion of God. But the Last Word is not our rejection. There is another Word that God has still to speak - the word of forgiveness and resurrection.
If, therefore, human rejection of God in the killing of God’s son is not enough to cut us off ultimately from God, then neither is death. God’s offer of Life in Christ continues. As Paul says, not even death can cut us off from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus.
Let us assume, with Moltmann, that there is such a thing as hell - human lostness - which is about the voluntary self-cutting off of ourselves from God. But what, if for all eternity, God’s love is directed towards us? Then death is not the final point of decision. Like the characters in The Great Divorce, there is the possibility of changing one’s mind.
This answers, for me, the otherwise baffling question of "Where is Hell?" I don’t mean geographically: I mean what part of reality can be godforsaken for all eternity and allow God to be God? Isn’t to be God to "fill all things"? On my reading above, hell is not Godforsaken. That seems to me to be part of the enormous wonder of the resurrection: there is nowhere that is God-abandoned or a no-go for Christ.
These are just musings and puzzlings, and I’d like to know what others think.