“Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved”

(Acts 16:31)

To hear glib talk about the “saved” and the “unsaved” has always made my flesh crawl. Especially do I deplore it when it is another mere man I hear making the judgments about who is and who isn’t “saved,” especially when the criterion for judgment is church membership or a decision for Christ, verbally expressed once and for all in some public assembly. I just don’t like it. It sounds so pious and smug and unrealistic.

Once, according to an article by Professor James Muilenburg in the May 1962 issue of the Union Seminary Review, someone asked Muilenburg, teacher of Old Testament at Union Seminary in New York, “What do you mean when you say you are saved?” Muilenburg replied: “I have never said this and have always found this kind of language hard to take. Throughout the years I have always studiously avoided such words as `salvation’ and `saved.’ The chief reason is that I was reared in a climate where people were always asking `Are you saved?”‘ Professor Muilenburg went on to recall an incident during his junior year in college when he went to a revival meeting conducted by a famous evangelist. At the close of his address, the evangelist called upon all who were “saved” to speak to the “unsaved.” Muilenburg could not find it in his heart to respond in any way, so he was approached by someone who asked, “Are you saved?” The college junior decided to give the man the answer he wanted, and said, “Yes.” So then the interrogator pressed the question and asked, “How do you know?” Muilenburg said he didn’t know and asked the man how he knew he was saved. Whereupon he quoted a passage from Scripture that seemed to be utterly irrelevant to young Muilenburg.

How many church people there are who share the revulsion of Professor Muilenburg and never talk about “the saved” and “the unsaved.”

And yet, if the Christian church does not have salvation to promise men and women as the result of God’s activity through the grace he has shown in Christ, what does the Church have to offer the world in general and every harassed person in particular? If it is not salvation that the Church offers, what commodity does it push? If we are not concerned about the saved and the unsaved, what is the Church’s concern? Putting on church suppers? Paying off mortgages on new buildings? Having teams compete in athletic contests?

Certainly the New Testament is full of language and stories and ideas where the concepts of “the saved” and “the lost” appear over and over. Jesus said of his purpose in coming, “The Son of man is come to seek and to save that which was lost.” He spoke of men being lost like a lost coin or a lost sheep or a lost, wandering, rebellious son. The gospel presents Jesus as moved with deep compassion when he beheld the multitudes of people who were scattered abroad like sheep without a shepherd. He invited all to receive the salvation God offered them through becoming his disciples, using those puzzling words: “Whosoever will save his life shall lose it; but whosoever shall lose his life for my sake and the gospel’s, the same shall save it.” And the early apostles in the Book of Acts and in their letters are repeatedly holding out to despairing men and women this one simple formula as the solution of their worst dilemmas: “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved.”

So our quarrel, it would seem, is not with the terms and the concepts of “the saved” and “salvation.” These are biblical and crucial in the mission of the Church. Rather our revulsion is at the superficial, selfish, and smug use of these words and ideas.

A careful examination of the New Testament will reveal that Jesus Christ and the apostles never presented salvation as merely a passport to heaven or a new kind of life slipped into or over some character by virtue of the fact that he stood up some Sunday morning and made a public profession of faith in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, and then went out and did as he jolly well pleased with this own and other people’s lives. To be saved in the New Testament sense is not merely making a decision once and for all, any more than one end of a piece of string is the whole ball of twine. The New Testament knows nothing of a salvation where only God is active and man is passive, where the saved is like one passenger out of many snatched in the nick of time from a doomed boat as it slips over the cataract to be dashed to destruction on the rocks below.

The New Testament very clearly states that to be saved means two very positive things. First, to be saved is to enter now into a living relationship with God through faith in Jesus Christ. This is a salvation that begins now, not when death severs our connection with this earth and we go into eternal orbit, not later and somewhere else, but here and now. It is bestowed only through faith in Jesus Christ. “No man cometh unto the Father, but by me,” said Jesus in a strangely proud and exclusive claim. And the early apostles preached, “There is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved.”

“Does this mean then that all people who die without having heard the name of Jesus are eternally damned?” asks many a sensitive soul.

No, it does not. We can trust the God and Father of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ to deal justly and mercifully with all his children in whatever situation their varying lots are cast. But it does mean that in this life the highest and best status that can be experienced by human beings is the saving relationship with God that comes through faith in Christ.

This, of course, involves making a decision for Christ now, professing faith in him, but it also involves acquiring knowledge of Jesus’ teachings now and continually, recognizing his spirit of reverence for all life, experiencing his consciousness of the Father’s presence and power, striving after the example of his obedience to the will of the Father.

Only such a full-orbed response by any one of us to the mercy God has shown us in Christ can result in tasting the genuine New Testament salvation that can best be described, as Muilenburg puts it in the Union Seminary Review, as “a sense of liberation, of being set free from the shackles of pride and ambition and anger and hostility and lust and emptiness and blindness … and from all the terrible demons that lay life waste and make it meaningless here and now.”

But this New Testament salvation, though beginning in time and ex­perienced in this world to a limited degree, has its ultimate and complete fulfillment beyond the life of this world. “I am the resurrection, and the life,” says Jesus. “He that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.”

The partial nature of our salvation in this world is one of Saint Paul’s themes in his great eighth chapter of the Roman letter, but here Paul insists that it affords us a trustworthy sample of the glorious and incomparable magnificent salvation we shall experience beyond death.

But there is a second and too often neglected aspect of the New Testament teaching on salvation: Salvation by God in Christ involves the one saved in the saving plans and purposes of God for the whole world. The saved Christian can never be an isolationist salvationist. The New Testament does not tell me that God is interested in saving me from global holocaust or from my own little personal hell that my selfishness has created; the New Testa­ment tells me that my salvation is included in and is a part of his salvation for the whole world. “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life…. And the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me … but not for me only, but for the whole world.” And this gospel that is “the power of God unto salvation” for all men he has entrusted to us and made us your ministers in his stead.

Here is the exact niche where Jesus’ perplexing, yet definitive, word on salvation fits: “Whosoever will save his life shall lose it; but whosoever shall lose his life for my sake and the gospel’s, the same shall save it.” What can one make of such a paradox? Can it be that this life we have in trust from God is like a rubber ball with an elastic cord attached — you have to throw it out and away from you in order to have it come back with an exhilarating rebound?

Here is where the God-ward and man-ward sides of our salvation are revealed. God has acted, moved mightily, reached low, to save us in Christ. But man must for his part make the venture of faith, trust, and reliance upon God in response. We must give, yea, even hazard, this life up to the hilt to be lived every day among others on the level Christ lived in order to be saved unto the uttermost.

In his Intellectual Autobiography, Reinhold Niebuhr, the theologian, tells about his first parish experience in Detroit:

Two old ladies were dying shortly after I assumed charge of the parish. They were both equally respectable members of the congregation. But I soon noted that their manner of facing death was strikingly dissimilar. One old lady was too preoccupied with self, too aggrieved that Providence should not have taken account of her virtue in failing to protect her against a grievous illness, to be able to face death with any serenity. She was in a constant hysteria of fear and resentment. … The other old lady had brought up a healthy and wholesome family, though her husband was subject to periodic fits of insanity which forced her to be the breadwinner as well as homemaker. Just as her two splendid daughters had finished their training and were eager to give their mother a secure and quiet evening of life, she was found to be suffering from cancer. I stood weekly at her bedside while she told me what passages of Scripture, what Psalms and what prayers to read to her; most of them expressed gratitude for all the mercies of God which she had received in life. She was particularly grateful for her two daughters and their love, and she faced death with the utmost peace of soul.

Both women had made their profession of Christian faith and become members of the same congregation. But they did not have Christian salvation in equal quantity and quality. The first was not saved from the fear of death but the second was. Why? How? The second had found her life by losing it in the kind of redeeming love that Jesus brought into the world. And this love that redeemed the lives of others about her also redeemed, saved, and blessed her, psychologically, socially, existentially, and eternally.

Why should anyone think this Christian doctrine of salvation strange or otherworldly? It has its secular counterpart. Scott Carpenter says quite frankly that one of the reasons he volunteered to become an astronaut was that it “gave him a chance for immortality, for pioneering on a grand scale. This is something,” says Carpenter, “that I would willingly give my life for, and I think a person is very fortunate to have something he can care that much about.”

Arnold Toynbee, who made himself at home in every period of recorded history, tells us in An Historian’s Approach to Religion that the Roman soldier had a zest for living unequaled in all lands and in all times until the Christian martyr stepped on the stage of history. Why did the Roman soldier possess this zest for living, this buoyancy and sense of meaning in his everyday existence, unequaled in all the world? Toynbee says it was because on the first day of every January each Roman soldier swore a solemn oath to defend the emperor and the empire with his life, and so he lived every moment for a cause for which he was prepared to lay down his life, and this gave unparalleled zest to living. Only the Christian martyr, whose allegiance to another lord and another kingdom outstripped the Roman soldier’s courage and commitment, was lifted to a superior level of life.

To be saved from all life’s deadly destroyers — sin and death and self and anxiety and fear and meaninglessness — is now and evermore shall be the deepest longing of every human heart. This is the salvation in its fullest and most satisfying form that can be yours and mine — now — as the gift of God through Jesus Christ — but only if we surrender ourselves to him.