If we do that, I am not too worried about Jesus' public image. He is committed to communicating himself. If we don't do that, he will find some other way, but we will have missed an opportunity not only to be relevant to our culture, but to live the joyful resurrection life that is our inheritance as followers of Jesus.
Is the story of sin, condemnation, and personal salvation by Jesus Christ unto eternal life something that our culture will still find attractive and appealing?
We should never underestimate the hunger, amongst our neighbors, for personal forgiveness, comfort, and hope. And we should never underestimate the dignity that the gospel of personal salvation, forgiveness, comfort, and hope offers to individual human beings in very oppressive environments. That is to say, the message that you as an individual are loved by God -- as the old evangelical truism has it, that even if you were the only person in the world, Christ would have died for you -- is most powerful precisely in situations of injustice and oppression that tend to eradicate individual identity and worth. So it is a profoundly liberating message, even if it's told in an old-fashioned way that it is about you (in the singular) and Jesus and your eternal destination. Even that is something that people hunger for, and even that message, although it is not adequate to the whole biblical story, brings tremendous fruit socially, by encouraging dignity and justice for people.
That being said, no one in the Bible asked Jesus to be his or her personal savior. At least not in those words. Peter says, "Lord, save me," for example, when he's drowning. Yet the Bible is a story of a people, not of individuals. We can miss that only if we throw out three-quarters of our Bibles -- the Old Testament part. It's a cosmic story, ultimately, in which individual human beings are of immense value, but their value is precisely connected to their part in the cosmic story. And that's not a newfangled idea that's replacing an old-fashioned truth. It's the broader framework that was lost as evangelicalism accommodated itself to American hyper-individualism. The story of individual salvation is true, but it gains its truth biblically from a broader truth and a bigger and better news than just the news of personal salvation. I happen to think that, for a whole bunch of reasons, our society is exiting the hyper-individualism that marked American life after the founding. I think the myths of individualism are getting tired. In that sense, I think our neighbors are no longer as likely to respond to a message of individual salvation.
Even the churches now that are most determined to proclaim that "original orthodox Gospel," as they see it, of personal salvation, pay attention to their corporate and community life. They are calling people into relationships in a way that the traveling evangelists never did. In fact it's very significant that we have no traveling evangelists now to speak of. All the evangelism that is happening now is happening in local church communities. The age of the tent, where individuals came and maybe had an encounter, is over.
Must we have a this-worldly form of salvation in order to be relevant and credible to a scientific, worldly age?
The cosmos is cooling, entropy is increasing, and this world will fade into nothing. If you want a scientific truth about this world, it is that it is going to end not in fire but in ice. Every atom will one day cease to move. If our hope is in this world, no matter how much good we can do in our brief little lives within it, then we have no hope truly. There must be a hope for a world beyond this world. And our responsibility in this world is to bring into this world signs of the world to come.
A this-worldly religion is not enough to tear me away from Starbucks and the New York Times on a Sunday morning. If our hope is only in this life, then let's eat, drink, be merry, and die. The eternal life we have to offer is not disembodied, it's not ‘souls', it's restored, renewed bodies, and the only example we have so far is the resurrected Jesus -- that Jesus who eats fish, walks through walls, speaks, breathes. That's where we're going. And if we aren't offering that hope, then we really have no hope.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In