NILS VON KALM says we have short-changed the Gospel…
Melbourne, Australia
It was July, 1984. I was sitting in the back of a Volkswagen Beetle at Chadstone Baptist Church with my Sunday school teacher (he was a used car dealer and I was his only student at the time).
Suddenly he asked me if I accepted Jesus Christ as my personal Lord and Saviour. I looked at him with a bit of confusion and said, “Yeah”. I’d always believed I’d accepted Jesus. I’d always believed in God and gone to church.
PICTURE: Jonny Gios/Unsplash
My Sunday school teacher suddenly looked at me with wide eyes, shook my hand and told me I’d done a wonderful thing. That just made me more confused. The truth was that I didn’t know what I’d done. It must have been something big because I’d never seen my Sunday School teacher so animated.
A couple of weeks later, another one of the adults in the church said to me, “I heard you made a commitment a couple of weeks ago”. I think I again said, “yeah” (as a shy teenager, I wasn’t exactly enamoured with a big vocabulary in those days!).
“What did happen that day in 1984 was that my life definitely started to take on a new direction. I thought that, since I had apparently done something hugely significant, I‘d better start reading the Bible. From then on, my spiritual walk has had ups and downs, confusion, joy, doubt, disillusionment, peace and a conviction about Jesus that I am still unable to let go of all these years later.”
Was I saved that day? Evangelicals love to mark the date they prayed the sinner’s prayer and became a real Christian.
If I was saved that day, what was I saved from? A fiery eternal torment in hell? My own sins? That’s what my evangelical tradition would tell me.
What did happen that day in 1984 was that my life definitely started to take on a new direction. I thought that, since I had apparently done something hugely significant, I‘d better start reading the Bible. From then on, my spiritual walk has had ups and downs, confusion, joy, doubt, disillusionment, peace and a conviction about Jesus that I am still unable to let go of all these years later.
What I have also learned over the years is that the Christian message is not about how to be saved.
Yes, you read that right.
As the New Testament scholar, Scot McKnight, says, the ‘Gospel’ we have generally been taught is a soteriologically-based one; that is, one based on a message of personal salvation. The true Gospel, though, is about God becoming King in Jesus (to read more about this, check out McKnight’s book, The King Jesus Gospel).
The very fact that people ask the question of what it means to be saved is reflective of our individualistic Western culture. We have been taught to believe that being saved is an individual experience, primarily about getting a free ticket to heaven and avoiding the other place.
The problem is that the Bible begs to differ.
We have short-changed the Gospel and missed the larger part of the Christian message. As well-known Australian preacher John Smith said many years ago, we have turned the Great Commission into the Great Omission.
Salvation in the Bible actually involves the whole of creation. That includes non-human creation. As Australian Christian leader Tim Costello has said, salvation is the restoration of the image of God. Everything God created is good, and we are called to love what God loves.
We see this, of course, in the opening pages of the Bible in the creation stories in Genesis. They show us that we are made in the image of God, placed in the temple. That’s what the Genesis creation stories are getting across. The whole of creation is God’s temple, and we humans are God’s ultimate image-bearers. As Isaiah 66 says, Heaven is God’s throne and the Earth is God’s footstool.
One chapter before this wonderful description, in Isaiah 65, we see the stunningly beautiful description of the new heavens and the new Earth, repeated at the very end of the Bible in Revelation 21 where Heaven and Earth are joined forever and we are told that there will be no more tears, pain, suffering or death.
This is the great and ultimate hope the Bible describes: the restoration of the temple, the whole of creation. This is salvation according to the Bible.
Salvation is nothing less than the restoration of the image of God in both the human and non-human creation. That is why not only our personal lives, but social justice, the environment, sexuality, economics, and politics are all central Christian issues.
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As far as human salvation goes, probably the best example Jesus gave of this was when He described the radical transformation of Zaccheus as a story of salvation. When the despised tax collector turned his life around and decided to take practical action by giving back four times what people owed him and selling half his possessions, it was this that Jesus described as salvation.
There was no sinner’s prayer; there was practical action as an outworking of genuine repentance. Nothing was said about Zaccheus now having a ticket to Heaven when he dies and being saved from the fires of hell. Instead, Jesus lauded him as an example of someone who has found his life. And, to confound the religious leaders, the despised tax collector is described as being just as much an insider as any of them.
To ask what it means to be saved is to miss the point of what salvation is. It implies that it is just about humans, and just about being forgiven by God and going to Heaven when we die.
Salvation is so much bigger than that. It is the story of how God became King in Jesus, is ruling the universe and that God’s creation will one day be completed when Heaven and Earth are joined forever. That is the story we need to proclaim from our pulpits.
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