
Do you know Jesus Christ as your personal savior? Do You know where you will go when you die? Do you know that you are saved?
Have you ever been on the receiving end of any of these questions? Maybe you have asked others these questions in an effort to evangelize. I have been thinking a lot lately about them. I admit that in my youth I naively used such questions as evangelism tools. Typically such questions are followed up with a statement meant to be reassuring -and lets face it - enticing. Maybe something like, ‘You can know today that you will go to heaven when you die.’
This post is not about the absurd individualism and narcissism behind the notion of promoting Jesus as “personal savior.” We do serve a personal God, yes. But God is personal in that he relates to persons in a covenant community and is concerned with all of the communities of the world not just individual salvation. Neither is this about the unfortunate practice of using scare tactics to welcome people to the kingdom of peace. Nor do I want to debate using the language of eternal security this side of being secured in eternity.
No, what I have been thinking about lately is how these questions must sound to those the church means well (usually) in trying to evangelize. We lead people with a series of questions that all revolve around personal knowledge: ‘Do you know Jesus?’ etc.
But what happens when someone takes the bate and asks ‘why do I need to be saved?’ Maybe the conversation goes something like this:
Christian: ‘You need to be saved because all have sinned an fallen short of the glory of God.
non- Christian: ‘Well I can buy that, to be human is to err and I know I have done some pretty awful things
Christian: ‘Yeah and it says so in the book of Romans’
non-Christian: ‘Umm okay, anyway, how did we get in this predicament in the first place and why would a good God make such a flawed creation?’
Christian: ‘Well you see human beings rebelled against God when Adam and Eve ate of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil’
Did you catch it? Knowledge is advertised as the solution to humankind’s dilemma and just when the person is ready to buy that they are hit in the face with knowledge as the problem. Often the contradiction goes unnoticed.
Fortunately neither proposition is true. Like in the garden narrative, the serpent deals in partial truths.
The man and the woman in the garden narrative, like all men and women are guilty. We are guilty not just of trying to steal the cookie from the forbidden cookie jar or just for trying to obtain knowledge of the distinction between good and evil by way of forbidden fruit. We are all guilty of trying to be like God, or be our own gods, apart from God.
The Late Russian Orthodox theologian Vladimir Lossky provides a wonderful insight into that strange story of the fall that we find in the third chapter of Genesis. He reminds us of the serpent’s words to Eve in the Garden of Eden: “You will be like God.” And he explains,
He [the serpent] does not altogether deceive man: for surely the latter is called to deification. But here “like” signifies an equality, through resentment, of him who stands up to God: autonomous god against God, god by himself, god of the earthly cosmos isolated from God.
It is standard practice for Eastern Christians to use the language of theosis or what is sometimes called deification to talk about salvation. This does not mean that human beings become ontologically like God (Eastern theologians like Lossky strongly emphasize that fact). But what it does mean is that human beings in right relationship to God become more like God in Character and holiness. But as Lossky reminds us the God-likeness that we are to strive for hinges on what the triune God has done in Christ and on participation in that through participation in the Christian community. He writes,
Entering the actuality of the fallen world, he broke the power of sin in our nature, and by his death, which reveals the supreme degree of his entrance into our fallen state, he triumphed over death and corruption. In baptism we die with Christ, symbolically, to rise again, really in him, in the new life of his victorious body
Thinking of the good news this way, the individualistic questions we often use in effort to share the gospel remind me more and more of those words of the serpent in the garden. ‘Yes, you too can be like God - in this case it is God’s eternality that is heavily promoted - by way of proper knowledge of God.’
I contend that instead of “knowledge” that belief or even better (and perhaps more “biblical”) faith and hope in what the triune God has done in Christ is a better way to talk about that which connects us with the spirit of the triune God and enables us to work out our salvation with fear and trembling in a community of believers.
Knowledge then is certainly not the problem. But it is not the answer either. We do not know God by way of empirical evidence. We do not know God the way we know 2+2, the laws of gravity or that we bleed when we are cut. We can test these things. I read somewhere we are not suposed to put God to the test. However, we can experience God through nature, through the community of faith, scripture, the sacraments, and sometimes even through a theophany. And in the eyes of faith these experiences can translate into belief and trust in the unseen. But that is still not the same as “then Adam knew his wife.”
Two things: first, I realize that one could argue I am using a really modern notion of knowledge, the way a rational empiricist might. And there are other ways to talk about knowledge akin to the way I use belief here. But my response to that is we are called to be an embodied witness in a world still radically shaped by an ugly thing called modernity. Secondly, I do not write this to poke fun at anyone who uses the type of evangelism techniques I have mentioned here. I have used them too. But I do hope this will prompt us to think twice before presenting the gospel in such a manner in the future.
Please think think on these things.
Shalom,
Wayne