Shape and Substance

Are You Being Saved?

Pat came home from a Bible study this afternoon smiling that smile she smiles when she knows she’s going to rattle my cage. They were studying Romans and, she said, her grin broadening almost imperceptibly, they got into a discussion of predestination and free will. She knows this is like waving a matador’s cape in front of a bull. I can’t resist.

I tried, really, I did. I asked questions, you know, like you’re supposed to do to demonstrate that you’re not jumping to the conclusion you’ve already jumped to. “What did you conclude?”

Well, she said, several of the women (all of whom except Pat are of the conservative evangelical persuasion) object to the notion of predestination altogether. They believe in free will, and in the power to/necessity of choosing to believe in Jesus as a prerequisite for salvation. “Then what,” I asked, “do they do with Romans 8:28” (you know: “In all things, God works for good” etc.)?

Well, they apparently feel that this only applies if you already believe in Jesus and are saved.  “But that,” she offered, “was not what I said.” She had me now, and she knew it.

“And what did you say?”

“I said that we have free will to make our own choices, but God in God’s sovereign freedom uses all those choices, no matter what they are, to accomplish God’s will.” Pat, after living with me for 35 years, is a fair country Reformed theologian.

Here we reach the first problem. After a lifetime of trying to live out the Reformed theology John Leith taught me in the early 1970s at Union Seminary, I have given up. I probably still cling, perhaps unconsciously, to some remnants of that Augustinian-Calvinist-Barthian edifice, but I have to confess that it’s mostly in ruins around my theological feet. 

“Well,” I ventured cautiously (although not nearly cautiously enough), “I think you still have a problem. Instead of preserving free will, you have obliterated it. If God’s permits our choices but uses them in crafting the divine will, whether we choose as God chooses or not, then our choices don’t have any ultimate meaning. You pretty much trump free will with the ace of Pauline predestinarianism.”

“Then what would you have said?” She was grinning openly now, since she knew she had lured me in and hooked me as deftly as if she had drifted a Chubby Chernobyl downstream to a holding trout.

I should add that she does this frequently—presents some theological gordian knot in the full knowledge that I can’t resist declaiming upon it from the rarified heights of my vaunted theological training. She knows that I am a sucker for the sound of my own voice and, worse, will never pass up an opportunity to air out my latest foray into heresy. I think she gets a kick out of watching me skating on intellectual thin ice: there is always the potential I might fall through and give her the show she is dying to see: a mansplainer extraordinaire sinking under the weight of his own arrogance.

Of course, that’s exactly what I did.

But now that the conversation is over and I’m brooding over the inadequacy of my explanations, it all has me wondering whether there might be a way out of this dilemma. It might involve thinking differently than we normally do; indeed, thinking in a way that, ultimately, we cannot think. It involves thinking like the Eternal.

Here’s what I mean. We are finite creatures, and a part of our finitude is our enmeshment in the framework of time. We are time-full, in the sense that all our thinking and acting and being takes place within the scale of linear, episodic development. This happened, and then this happened, and then this happened. Add causality to that, and you get this happened, which then caused this to happen, which then brought about this. We think that we make choices, and those choices cause consequences, and we then make other choices to deal with the consequences of our first choices. And so on. Free will is the expression of this time-full-ness as regards our living before the reality we call “God.” I make this choice—to believe or not to believe, to “accept Jesus as my savior” or not—and the consequences of that choice are (a) a presumed place in some scheme of salvation that stretches beyond my death, (b) a comfort in the present that I have a certain knowledge of my enduring security, and (c) usually, my participation in community with others of similar faith commitment in both celebration of our securities and (hopefully) service to others in the name of the Securer, Jesus Christ. In the minds of many, it is also possible for me to undo my security and lose both my comfort and my communal place if I cease to believe, if I “backslide” into faithlessness and moral turpitude. But regardless which way I am traveling on this soteriological Jacob’s ladder, the movement is just that: movement. Which implies linear temporal development. Time-full-ness.

It seems to me, however, that the Holy is not time-full. The Holy is the Eternal, in Greek aiónios, which comes over into Latin as aeternus and means “un-timed” or “not subject to time.” Because the Holy is not bound by time separated as it is into distinct moments, within the Holy all time is one time, which is to say it is no time, or time-less. To the Holy, all human choices and sequences and narratives and developments are all simultaneously present in the Eternal Moment. There is no lineal development; within the Holy, all moments and all choices and all times and all places are the same action, time, or place, which is to say the eternal. It’s not that “God knows what you will do,” and uses it, whether you want it or no, to accomplish what God intends. It is rather that in the Eternal, you have chosen and will choose and are choosing all at the same time, and without distinction or movement or change. It looks and feels and seems like—and indeed, is—movement and change to us, here in our time-full linearity. To the Eternal it is the one all-encompassing present. It is not that the “God” is working out our salvation for us; it is that in the Eternal, not-saved and saved are all the same, all one in the One within whom there are no distinctions or differences.

Which then leads me to wonder (and here is the heretical part, so roll up your rosaries and batten down your Scofield Chain-Reference Bible) whether there is any ultimate meaning in the word, “salvation.” Whether “being saved” is, for all intents and purposes not merely a “done deal” but a non-deal. Or, to be more precise, whether what we call salvation has meaning only to us, entrapped as we are in our time-full-ness, as a symbolic mark of what seems to us a change in life in relation to others and to that which we imagine as “God.” It is not meaningful to the Eternal, to the One, in whom all things and all times and all conditions are one and within whom there is no change. We are already saved and not-saved, have always been saved and not-saved. Within the One, there are no distinctions, and hence no development.

The Neo-Platonists understood this better than we do, I think. Coming out of the tradition of Greek philosophy, where the quest was for the One radically simple Thing that underlies all things, they understood “God”—or, as Plotinus named it, the One—to be radically Simple. That is to say, the One is one because within the one there cannot be two. Within the Eternal there cannot be a yesterday, today, and tomorrow because there is only the Eternal. Within the Holy, there is no unholiness (and therefore no “good” or “evil”) because there is no dichotomy between holy and not-holy. There is only the radical Singularity of the One. There is not even Being, because Being implies non-being. There is only the One. And within the One, all things are one thing, and the one thing is the One.

So, am I saved? Yes, and no, and who cares? Here in my time-full-ness, I can worry about it, or not, and it matters neither fig nor farthing. In the Eternal Moment, as Qoheleth says, “What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done; there is nothing new under the sun” (Ecc. 1:9). Salvation belongs to the category of the time-full, not the time-less Eternal.

Do I have free will? Yes, and no, and who cares? Here in my time-full-ness, it seems to me, and indeed it is, that I make choices that have consequences. But my choices and their consequences, as well as my states of mind and being both before the choices and after the consequences are not distinct movements and actions and conditions, but all one reality. Hitler and Pol Pot and the Donald may seem evil to me (or, at the least, banal) and their actions heinous (or, perhaps, merely ludicrous). But their words and actions are all one in the One, in whom Good and Evil, while mattersome to us, are one. Free will belongs to the category of multiple actions-and-consequences, not the radical Simplicity of the One.

One of the hallmarks of Reformed theology has been its emphasis on election, God’s calling of people into special relationships of service and salvation. But if salvation has no more meaning than I think, then is not “election” drained of its significance? And if either none of us or all of us are “saved,” does this not also mean that either no one or everyone is “elect?” Which, it seems to me, rather lets the air out of the argument that anyone—me, you, Presbyterians (however frozen in our chosenness), Israel either ancient or modern, the United States—has any special relationship with the Holy. I said in some written piece of mine somewhere that election was God’s biggest mistake. That’s wrong. The mistake—presuming that special status in relation to the One is possible, let alone desirable—is our mistake. The Holy has nothing to do with it.

There is a great deal more to say by way of conclusions to be drawn—to wit: who was Jesus and what is the significance of the crucifixion, if not to save us? What is the trinity, if the One is indivisible? What is the “Christian hope” if temporal linearity is not basic to the divine nature?—all fodder for other hoped-for conversations. But perhaps I am in deep enough dookey as it is and would do well to shut up now. My sole comfort lies in the fact that I am an old man who no longer has ecclesiastical, pastoral, or educational responsibilities. What I think doesn’t really matter anymore, which is a daily source of relief. If you’ve managed to hang with this all the way to the end and feel so inclined, I am grateful to you, and I would love to hear what you think, either by return email or comment on the blogsite.

All the best.