The biblical testimony of God as the waiting father, the passionate lover is difficult for us because as modern people we are creations of the Enlightenment. During the Enlightenment, the individual was invented as the sovereign, supreme center of reality. Human beings were said to be most fully developed when they are most completely self-sufficient, selfmade, and self-reliant. The truly developed person learns to shed social connections and restraints and stand alone, stripped of relations. From a Christian point of view, in the Enlightenment the modern self did not grow; it shrank. The thin contemporary self, a creation of the individual's choices of the moment, responsible only for itself, having no greater project than itself was the self shed of the very qualities that previously were thought to be most humane. Therefore, to be told that salvation is tethered to a God who connects, a God whose Trinitarian nature is inherently relational, communitarian, and communicative, is to encounter a God who appears to be against everything in which we believe. There is a reason why there is no God in the Harry Potter novels. Potter is not only good entertainment but also training in how to get by in the modern world alone, yet with an active imagination.
Christians have the intellectual means for devising one of the most pessimistic assessments of human nature. We really do believe that all of us, all, are sinners, all the way down, gleefully on our way to hell in a handbasket. Believing this enabled me to say—when George W. Bush told us that we were going into Iraq for the very best of motives to do the very best of work—"Probably not." When told that the purpose of our war was "Enduring Freedom," I responded, "Probably not." By the way, belief in the persistence of sin also enabled me to say (quietly, to myself), when someone said that I was one of the most selfless, godly bishops ever, "Probably not."
We are able to be pessimistic about human motives and achievements (most especially our own) because we are optimistic about the ultimate triumph of a God who saves the ungodly. Ephesians says that we are as good as dead but that, in our salvation, God pulls off nothing less than resurrection. Confidence in the salvific triumph of God enables us to tell the truth about us. We are sad, scary beings, but God,
who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved—and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the ages to come he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not of your own doing; it is the gift of God. (Eph 2:4-8)
For most of the people to whom I've preached, the most challenging words in this Pauline passage are that salvation "is not of your own doing; it is the gift of God." Reasonably well fixed, fairly well off, mostly successful in getting anything we want through our checkbooks, we are surprised that there is anything, including our situation with God, that is not the result of our own doing, anything that is pure gift, grace. As Scripture teaches, "salvation is from the Jews" (John 4:22). Salvation is not what we desire or earn. We must, therefore, submit to Scripture, must bow to Jews and their testimony; we must allow ourselves to be welcomed into the salvific promises of God to Israel.
Creation implies donation. In a world that is created, all is gift. This is a difficult truth for those of us who are modern and who have, therefore, been taught to believe that all good is an achievement of our sole fabrication. Knowledge is reduced to power, a possession, the accumulation of which enables us better to dominate the world. Plato (and Augustine) taught that in order really to know something, the would-be knower must be willingly seduced by the object of knowing, to fall in love with what is to be known, to enjoy erotic participation in the object of our knowing. We, however, want to know in order to dominate, to use. In a world of utility, there is paucity of gratitude and little real joy.
God help you if you try to think about a gratuitous matter like salvation in this utilitarian way. Christians are taught to believe that everything is only what we have been given. Augustine was fond of quoting 1 Corinthians 4:7 which he translates as, "What do you have that you haven't received? And if you have received it, why boast as if you hadn't?"
Salvation, from our side, is acceptance rather than decision, result, or program because salvation is, in the words of Paul, "free gift":
The grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, abounded for the many. . . . If, because of the one man's trespass [Adam], death exercised dominion through that one, much more surely will those who receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness exercise dominion in life through the one man, Jesus Christ. (Rom 5:15, 17)
Note that Paul uses the more passive "receive" (lambano) rather than the more active "decide" or "choose," stressing the work of Christ rather than our decision. When asked, "Where were you saved?" Barth replied, "On Golgotha."
To glory in salvation as a possession, to boast of it as something achieved and now owned, is to show that one is fundamentally confused.
C. S. Lewis speaks of his conversion to Christ as an act that God worked in him that was almost coercive in its effect, that time when "God closed in on me" and he came to the cross as "a prodigal who is brought in kicking, struggling, resentful, and darting his eyes in every direction as a chance for escape." 3
ETERNAL LIFE
It is this miraculous, gifted quality of salvation that is lacking in popular pagan views of death and the afterlife. Most people I know believe in the "immortality of the soul"—there is in us a divine spark that goes on and on even after our physical death. That's Plato, not Paul. Greeks like Plato taught that human beings possess an immortal, imperishable "soul" that goes on, in some shadowy sense, beyond the ravages of physical death.
"I believe that my daughter has now become the rain, the wind moving in the trees, the stars that shine in the night," said a woman to me after her daughter died of leukemia. I'm sure that her notion of immortality was comforting to the grieving mother. And yet, I feared that it would ultimately turn out to be false comfort. First, it seemed to me a sad denial of the horror and the tragedy of a young woman's death. Wind moving through the trees is small potatoes compared with a living, breathing, loving, adorable person. Paul said that death is hated, the "final enemy" (1 Cor 15:26), and I believe him right. Second, wind moving through the trees is leftover small change compared with the treasure of a distinct, embodied, personality whom we have known and loved, loved not so much for her general humanity, but loved personally in her delightful particularity. I feared that this grieving mother was settling for too little. But mine is a point of view prejudiced by Christian salvation.
Christians believe that nothing about us is eternal. As X. J. Kennedy's poetic, washed-out whore says, "For when Time takes you out for a spin in his car / You'll be hard-pressed to keep him from going too far."4 When we die, we die. We don't just appear to be snuffed out, then to sail forth into some vague metaphysical, shadowy state. We return to the dust from which we came. Tears and wailing are appropriate responses from loved ones when the sting of death strikes their beloved. And yet, in a spectacular miracle of God, the same God who raised dead Jesus somehow reaches in, defeats the enemy death, and takes us along as well. Jesus was resurrected into some new "body" whereby he appeared to his disciples in his resurrected state. It was a very different body—he could walk through doors, appear and disappear to his disciples. They did not readily recognize him in his