For Anyone Who Believes Salvation Is a Process...
I have a friend who is struggling between several Christian denominations. She is attracted to the ancient "first-ness" of one religion, but she also can't deny the whole "sola scriptura" (going by the Bible alone) thing.
Well, sir, for a person like Moi, who happens to believe that the Bible is God's word, and the ultimate (and only) source of direction for all things Christian, I prefer to not go by labels and denominations, mostly because 1- the Bible is the Bible is the Bible, and 2- many labels have negative connotations.
But. Certain denominations put stock into beliefs that I think are not only extraneous but dangerous to believe.
For example, my friend thinks that you have to go through life NOT KNOWING if you're going to heaven or not.
Now, I am not suggesting that once you're saved you can just do what you want (kind of like getting dolled up pre-wedding, and “letting it all hang out,” sans makeup, after the knot-tying), BUT if a person is trusting Jesus to save him from sin—if this person chooses Jesus and truly forsakes all other, if this person trusts that the blood of Jesus is powerful enough to save him—then how can we turn around and basically lessen the strength of His sacrifice?
And people DO lessen it when they intimate that the Blood isn’t enough.
I know what you’re thinking: “Well, Sally, you can’t just up and expect to go to heaven coz you said three nice words, can you?”
But I can, and I do.
Because when a person CONFESSES that Jesus is the Son of God, when they ACCEPT that He died on the cross and became a bridge to the Holy God who couldn’t even look at the unholy and sinful humans, when they REPENT from their sin (and I don’t just mean they put down the bottle or finally married the person they’ve been living with, I mean they asked God to make them into a new creation)—then the person is saved from sin.
Consider:
ROMANS 10:9-13
“The word is near you, in your mouth and in your heart”[e](that is, the word of faith which we preach): 9 that if you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead, you will be saved. 10 For with the heart one believes unto righteousness, and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation. 11 For the Scripture says, “Whoever believes on Him will not be put to shame.”[f] 12 For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek, for the same Lord over all is rich to all who call upon Him. 13 For “whoever calls on the name of the LORD shall be saved.”[
Now, then. This does NOT mean that you can just go out robbing banks and violating laws (God’s or man’s).
What it DOES mean, however, is that, by your acceptance of Jesus, you sort of give the Holy Spirit the request that He would both reign in you, as well as rein you in, both before and after the fact.
A person who was truly saved would be unable to live with him- (or her-) self, knowing that they had hurt God in such a way. So he would either NOT do it, or beg for forgiveness and have a slightly harder time returning to his sin (as a dog returns to his vomit. Sorry for the dramatics, but a mental picture like that is worth 10,000 words!).
Of course, there’s always the issue of a reprobate mind, or the other issue of planning to sin and planning to ask for forgiveness (which won't wash, by the way) but that’s another story.
My final—and most hard-hitting—argument isn’t some obscure verse; rather, it’s mere (human) logic: If God is so holy that He required a bridge/sacrifice/what-have-you to even be able to interact with the imperfect and unholy humans that we are, can anyone even think that they can be good enough in their lifetime to “earn” their salvation?
They can’t. Mother Theresa wasn’t good enough, and neither are you.
And even if a person WAS able to “be that good” (like, perhaps, a baby or a mentally-challenged person who is innocent and good-natured, unable to conceive of or carry out sin), there is always the matter of original sin that is as much a part of humanity as DNA and a need for water and oxygen.
I’m sure I’ll get a boatload of email with verses that Catholics and Orthodox (and, indeed, other “non-Protestants”) like to cite, and guess what: I already have all sorts of answers ready for y’all, but I want to stress that, to me, anyway, it’s not about “which denomination is right,” it’s about following Jesus as best as we know how (assuming we’re Christians in the first place!) and really being so in-tune with the Holy Spirit that we would rather die than grieve Him with our shenanigans. (And, while I can’t speak for you lot, I myself have more shenanigans in my past, present, and future than I care to admit, though I kind of have to, don’t I?)
At ANY rate, I do thank God—so much!—that He provided a way for us imperfect and sin-ridden people to be with Him forever.
Sally Bishai is a writer and journalist who founded X Culture Magazine in January, 2004, and Photo X Quarterly in January 2005. She is also president of the Copt X Fellowship, a non-partisan group dedicated to promoting love, harmony, and respect among Egyptians (and friends). Sally is Egyptian American (or, more specifically, Coptic) and loves to tell people what that means! Her previous titles include "Mid-East Meets West: On Being and Becoming a Modern Arab American," and "Date like An Egyptian: The Egyptian's Guide to Finding a Mate...Or Date." Sally is the host of "Sally Bishai's 30 Minutes With," a webshow that largely focuses on Coptic, civil, and human rights issues, as well as topics dealing with the Middle East. Her documentaries include "Back To Square One? Fifty Years After Emmett Till," "Strange Behaviour: How Westerners Feel About Gender Roles in the Middle East," and the soon-to-be-released "Children of Kemet: The Copts, Culture, and Democracy of Egypt." Sally's blog, "The AntiSocialite," holds information about current projects, as well as impassioned articles about politics, current headlines, the trouble with society, and many other things that will probably end up getting her killed. (Check it out at http://sallybishai.blogspot.com ) Sally's Bachelor's of Science was in psychology, but her Master's and the Ph.D. she's currently working on are in speech and intercultural communication. She teaches various classes at the university level, and finds time to lecture (off-campus) about her books, her culture, and other controversial topics. Sally has worked in radio (international and "domestic"), fashion photography, and film, most recently working as a documentary filmmaker (as mentioned above). Her current project deals with the persecution of Egypt's Copts, which, if you'll remember, she happens to be.
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Comments
I'm not going to try to tackle your whole piece now; maybe I never will. I'm going to comment on one sentence.
You said, "It’s not about 'which denomination is right,' it’s about following Jesus as best as we know how." Now this is formally called "begging the question" -- i.e., basing a proof on the conclusion that is itself to be proven. To prove that denominations don't matter it assumes that denominations don't matter.
Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox and Roman Catholics and other kinds of Catholics all share the conviction or claim that the "best way we know how" to follow Jesus is, by God's own action and God's own will, found in the mind of the Church. The mind of the Church includes not only written Scripture but also oral tradition, worship patterns, decisions of ecumenical councils, revered patterns of life, and so on. Christ's Church, and the mind of the Church, existed, operated, and were authoritative well before the documents we now have as the New Testament were written, collated, selected, and agreed upon as being "Scripture." So we Orthodox and Catholics of various kinds say that "scripture only" fails to explain or justify the life of the Church (the body of Christ) in the decades and even centuries before the texts coalesced and were declared to be inside or outside "scripture." In this view, God established the church before He provided the New Testament scripture, and hence to learn how best one can follow Jesus one has to attend to the wider mind of the Church, which includes Scripture and in which Scripture coalesced.
Now I can be pretty sure that you aren't going to buy that argument. But what I would like you to do is to try to see that people like me who think "denominations" do matter think that way *because* we want to do what God wants us to do, not because we value "denominations" for their own sake. Your implied dichotomy between, on the one hand, people who just want to follow God as best they can, and on the other hand, people who assert that one "denomination" holds or reveals God's truths more fully than others, doesn't divide the real world very usefully.
In a way it's unfair of me to focus on one sentence; but obviously I couldn't tackle everything at once. And there are many things we agree upon.
For one thing, we can probably agree that focusing on being right rather focusing on following Christ is a sin that is found among all varieties of people who are called "Christian" or call themselves "Christian." As an Orthodox I might point to the amazing and (to me) dismaying fragmentation of Protestants into "denominations" since the Reformation; you have already pointed to people who focus on organizations and intellectual positions (including "denominations") instead of focusing on following Christ.
(I put "denominations" in quotation marks all the time because although there were divisions among Christians in the first millenium and a half, I deem "denominations" in the usual usage to be a product of post-Reformation Western Europe. So I wouldn't normally call Roman Catholicism, Orthodoxy, or Coptic Orthodox Christianity "denominations.")
May the peace of the Lord, which passes all understanding, be with you and those near to you.
"My final—and most hard-hitting—argument isn’t some obscure verse; rather, it’s mere (human) logic: If God is so holy that He required a bridge/sacrifice/what-have-you to even be able to interact with the imperfect and unholy humans that we are, can anyone even think that they can be good enough in their lifetime to 'earn' their salvation?"
I'm a bit mystified that this is seen as a powerful argument in favor of one Christian assertion about salvation and against others. It seems to be saying that Catholics, Orthodox, and some other Christians preach salvation by works. But no Christians that I'm aware of preach this, and certainly neither Catholic nor Orthodox teach salvation by works. So perhaps one thing I can contribute is to correct possible misconceptions about what Catholicism and Orthodoxy teach. There are enough real issues that divide us that we don't need misconceptions to add to them or intensify them.
Anyone who wishes to know what Orthodoxy teaches would do well to obtain a copy of the Orthodox Study Bible, published by Thomas Nelson Publishers. There are single-page essays on some topics, and notes throughout the text. For instance, there is an essay "Justification by Faith" that says at one point, "A discussion of faith *versus* works was unprecedented in Orthodox thought." (p. 348)
About "salvation as process," my own way of stating the Orthodox position is that we are talking about something that is at the intersection of the timeless (the eternal) and the time-full (our current life and world), and this means that time-bound language about an event or a sequence or a process falls into trouble. The Orthodox formula I have been taught is: "Apostolic preaching understands salvation in three tenses: (1) past: we have been saved, in baptism; (2) present: we are being saved, working out our salvation in cooperation with God (Phil. 2:12,13); and (3) future: we shall be saved at the Judgment." Orthodox Study Bible, note on Acts 15:11.
Now to stress what we agree on: we all agree that salvation is necessary and possible, it is the free gift of God and cannot be earned, and it was through the incarnation, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus that God redeemed fallen humanity.
Blessings upon you in your ministries and in your personal walk of faith.