How "Saved" Are You, If All You Care About is Being "Saved"

Steve Scott questions whether evangelism is what the church is all about. I would like to think not, but getting into the subject makes me more than a little queasy. The whole damnation/redemption narrative bothers the hell out of me.

Here’s how it was laid out for me when I was living among the Baptists. Adam and Eve committed what seemed to be a pretty minor infraction and brought down the wrath of God on themselves and their posterity. Because of this sin, every human being is condemned to eternal torment in Hell. You can get out of this by following the Law to the letter and sacrificing animals, although you will almost certainly fail in some respect and burn forever anyway. Or, God could pay the blood price Himself by becoming human and allowing Himself to be killed. This would wipe out the effects of sin, but only for certain individuals.

It gets complicated when you try to figure out who is saved and who is not. The Baptists I knew reckoned that you had to “accept” Jesus as your “personal Lord and Savior” and stop sinning. You had to be careful not to “backslide” and lose your salvation. Heck, you could never really be sure you had been saved in the first place what with the possibility of lingering doubt. The only way to be sure was to follow an increasingly restrictive regimen of joyless living and condemnation of others.

When I became a Calvinist, it seemed to get simpler. God saved whomever it pleased Him to save, and those who “believed on” Jesus were the elect. Of course, you still couldn’t be sure that you were among the elect so you’d have to manifest signs of salvation through righteousness and good works.

In either case, the Christian offers to the unbeliever a narrative of a vengeful God who offers a way out through beliefs and practices that are patently unattractive and often at odds with the teachings of Jesus. Where is the love? A loving God condemns most of mankind to eternal torture with no hope of redemption, and the followers of His Son are fixated on their own fate in the afterlife.

If I am in Christianity for the afterlife, it is hard to see this as a sign of the transformative power of the Holy Ghost working within me and allowing me to love as Jesus commanded me to love. It is just selfishness and egoism on a grand scale. It means that I really don’t get it at all. I’m probably not even saved.

I hope that I’m in it for the Kingdom, here and now and wherever mankind may be over the next few billion years. I want to love my fellow man, those in the world today and those who will come after us. If I advance the cause of the Kingdom one iota, I will benefit untold generations in the future and help establish a persuasive living witness for the Gospel and the transforming power of the Holy Ghost.