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Can We Save Ourselves?
Do-it-yourself Soteriology
By Dr. Thaddeus Williams
This is part 3 from the truthXchange compendium The Coming Pagan Utopia: Christian Witness in Tough Times
In addition to the Oneist doctrines that man is basically good, that the material world is basically evil, and that reason is the enemy, the church has also absorbed the doctrine that salvation is essentially a matter of human performance. We may call this the Leo-the-Tenthonian Captivity of the Church. Leo the Tenth was Pope of the Roman Catholic Church in the early sixteenth century. This Bishop of Rome funded the architectural and aesthetic feat of Saint Peter’s Basilica through the indulgence industry. Indulgences were letters issued by the church to reduce time spent in purgatory. Leo took this centuries-old practice to a new level by offering a plenary indulgence, which altogether eradicated one’s purgatorial sentence. With the help of the itinerant preacher and inquisitor, John Tetzel, Leo’s paper passports to heaven were sold throughout Europe with memorable appeals like, “The moment your coin in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory springs.”
The sale of indulgences (along with the relic industry that flourished under Leo) implied that we can, by human power, affect or even secure our own salvation status. It is no small irony that the Roman Catholic Church, centuries before Leo, had officially rejected the notion that humans have power to perform their way to salvation. In the fourth century, Augustine demonstrated the vast divide between Pelagian views of human moral ability and the biblical picture of God’s radical grace in saving otherwise helpless sinners. Church councils in 418, 431 and 529 reiterated Augustine’s view. Yet between the sixth and the sixteenth centuries, Rome turned to a system that highlighted human performance, complete with indulgences, relics, and meritorious acts of penance.[1]
Wittenberg’s controversial theology professor, Martin Luther, took his famous stand against Leo and Tetzel, protesting a performance-based system. As a monk, Luther personally followed the performance-based system to its hopeless conclusions—sleeping without a blanket on the floor in the frigid German winter, gazing upon relics, bruising his back with self-flagellation, spending hours daily in the confessional booth, making a holy pilgrimage to Rome. This quest to secure his own salvation led Luther “to the very abyss of despair so that I wished I had never been created.” Luther then encountered the beautiful biblical antithesis to his doomed self-powered salvation attempts. Upon reading Paul’s letter to the Romans, Luther said, “I felt that I was altogether born again and had entered paradise itself…”[2] The gospel-liberated Luther helped to catalyze the Protestant Reformation with its rally cry that salvation is by grace alone (sola gratia), through faith alone (sola fide), in Christ alone (sola Christos), to God’s glory alone (soli Deo gloria)—good news found in the final authority that is scripture alone (sola scriptura).
4.2 The Leo-the-Tenthonian Captivity of the Church
With these affirmations the Protestant Reformation championed the biblical antithesis to a soteriology based on human performance. It returned to the saving sufficiency of Christ’s performance. Yet today’s Protestant church has returned to a performance-based salvation. A poll conducted by the Barna Research Group asked Protestants in mainline denominations: “Do you get to heaven by performing good works?” A staggering 73% answered ‘yes.’ Nearly three out of four Protestants in mainline denominations have now embraced the very doctrine Protestantism was originally protesting!
4.3 The Biblical Antithesis to Do-it-yourself Soteriology
The Bible does not picture our situation as that of a man in the well who needs but a rope from God in order to climb out. Rather, we are dead at the bottom of the well, flatlined to the things of God. God comes down the rope himself to jolt spiritual life into us with divine grace, then throws us on his back and climbs out. Salvation is God’s work, beginning middle and end, so he gets all the glory. In Paul’s words,
And you were dead in your trespasses and sins…But God being rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in our transgressions, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved… (Eph. 2:1, 4–5)
What a beautiful antithesis to any self-powered salvation system!
Only within a Twoist framework, with its essential Creator-creature distinction, does the beautiful gospel antithesis make sense. Oneism eliminates a transcendent, holy, holy, holy God under whom we stand in a vertical relation. In a Oneist system, we assess ourselves on the horizontal plane, compare ourselves to other creatures, and justify our belief that we’re not so bad, convincing ourselves that the power to save must ultimately lie within. In secular and post-secular contexts different meaning may be poured into the term “salvation” (e.g., Condorcet’s scientifically achieved utopia, Vivekananda’s self-deifying realization of the heaven within, an Aquarian age ushered in by a biocentric nature worship, etc.). But the Oneist premise is the same: we can save ourselves. In Luther’s day, Western culture was far more monolithic, given the scope of Rome’s power. Thus, the gospel of grace could be articulated against that more monotone cultural backdrop. In our day, Western culture seems to have no singular voice for the church to answer. Yet for all the diverse worldview colors in our pluralistic culture, there is a shared doctrine, one arc that shapes the rainbow: the doctrine that salvation, however defined, is a feat humanity can achieve by our own performance. Thus, our message today needs to be the same as Luther’s day, a message of grace, of our profound brokenness and of God’s unique power to save through the perfect performance of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection. Where are the Pauls, the Augustines, and the Luthers of our day, who will help our utopian neighbors with the Twoist gospel of God’s grace? I pray you are reading this book.
Are We the Source and Standard of True Love?
Self-Defined, Self-Powered Love
We are called to help a Oneist culture that champions the doctrines of man’s goodness, Platonic spirituality, irrational mysticism, and salvation by human power. Lastly, we turn to culture’s doctrine of self-defined, self-powered love. It was John Lennon, the great troubador and utopian, who challenged us to imagine a world of peace where the brotherhood of man replaces greed and hunger, a time with no religion when “the world will be as one.” Lennon’s utopian vision was explicitly Oneist with “above us only sky.” It was Lennon who composed the memorable anthem of the late 1960s “All you need is love,” a simple message that struck a deep chord around a world racked by war, greed, and racism.
While love certainly is the answer (even in a Christian worldview), we may ask: What happens to love in a system with no Creator-creature distinction? With no transcendent reference point to distinguish true versions of love from perversions of love, the concept is essentially up for grabs. The word becomes slowly bleached of all objective, semantic value and turned into a sentimentalized banner that we can wave over virtually anything. For many during the 1960s and 70s the term became synonymous with having consequence-free sex with many anonymous partners. Starting from a Oneist worldview premise, “modern man tries to hang everything on the word love,” according to Francis Schaeffer.Yet as Schaeffer goes on to observe, “he has no adequate universal for love… so love can easily degenerate into something very much less.”[3]
An episode of the Jerry Springer Show, as a case-in-point, featured a husband dressed in sadomasochistic leather and chains shouting ‘I love you!’ to his weeping wife. He professed his “love” while simultaneously parading his active sexual relationships with his wife’s brothers. From a Oneist perspective, what renders this husband’s Oneist “love” objectively any better or worse than the love of the faithful husband kissing his treasured wife of fifty years? With no reference point beyond the realm of human experience, Oneism eventually irons away all distinctions in the realm of love into one flattened fabric in which every personal version (or perversion) of love is pressed to the same level.
Not only does the definition of love become radically subjectivized, but the power to love must be found within the autonomous individual. We become both the standard and the source of true love. There is no need for God to exorcise the radical egocentrism that haunts our hearts. We can achieve true love simply by asserting our willpower to love better. A vast library of self-help literature offers to help us do exactly that, by tapping into our own latent love powers.
The Lennonian Captivity
Today’s church is bound in a Lennonian captivity in which self-defined, self-powered love has become a dominant theme. “Love” is often redefined as radical tolerance that refuses to call anything ‘sin’ (thereby rendering the cross-work of Christ irrelevant). A vast litany of contemporary theologians champions the claim that authentic love must originate from the autonomous human power of free will.[4] We rely on ourselves rather than God as the ultimate power source for authentic love.
In his book, The Rise of Christianity, Rodney Stark concludes that Christianity moved from a small, motley band of believers in and around Jerusalem to the most pervasive faith of the Roman Empire because Christians simply out-loved their neighbors.[5] There was a quality, consistency, and costliness of love among early Christians that was totally disproportionate to their social status. It called for a divine explanation. Yet the culture’s commentary on today’s church is scarcely the recognition of such an extraordinary love. Could this sad shift be partially explained in the fact that that self-powered rather than Spirit-powered models of love have become the norm in the 21st century church?
The Biblical Antithesis to Self-Defined/Self-Powered Love
Today’s church needs the biblical antithesis to self-defined, self-powered love. Paul leads the Christians in Thessalonica to the true source of authentic love, praying, “May God cause you to increase and abound in love” (1 Thess 2:13). In looking to God as the ultimate Source of authentic love, Paul is merely mimicking Jesus. The night before his execution, Jesus prays that his church would “be one” as he and the Father are one (John 17:20–21). Unlike John Lennon’s vision of oneness, the oneness Jesus requests for his church cannot be accomplished by cooperative human willpower. The very fact that Jesus is praying for this oneness in his church, asking his Father to actualize such loving unity, presupposes that such love finds God as its ultimate Source. Jesus’ prayer rests on the premise that only his Father is able to answer it. Only divine sovereignty can bring about authentic love in our hearts and in our churches.[6]
Jesus also clarifies that we are not the ultimate reference point for defining true love. Jesus says to his Father, “You loved me before the foundation of the world” (John 17:24b). Love is not a mere human construct. Long before our race sought relational connections, love existed and was enjoyed within the tripersonal God. We can see this in the very opening of John’s gospel, which begins with the Logos, who both “was God” and “was with God” before creation. Rather than picturing God as a solitary deity who needed to create out of unbearable lonesomeness, John tells us that there was relationship before matter, space and time began— relationship within the Trinity. By the fourteenth verse of his prologue, John no longer expresses Trinitarian truths with Logos language. Instead, he speaks of the “Son” (a personal and relational word the Greeks could not ascribe to their concept of Logos). As his narrative unfolds, John captures this intratrinitarian intimacy by moving from the language of with-ness to the language of in-ness—“I am in the Father and the Father is in me” (John 14:11). From John we learn that the same Logos who “was God,” “with God,” “loved” by the Father, and “in the Father” created everything (John 1:3). We are, therefore, created for relationship by a God who is, and always has been, in relationship. With John’s help, we can see clearly the biblical antithesis to self-defined, self-powered love. In John’s words, “Let us love one another, because love comes from God” (1 John 4:7). May we live this loving antithesis in the 21st century church!
Conclusion
It is time for the church around the world to make a mass exodus from our captivity to Pelagius, Plato, Schopenhauer, Leo X, and Lennon. Let’s leave behind the doctrines that man is all good, that nature is all bad, that thinking is the enemy, that we can save ourselves, and that we are the reference point and ultimate source of love.
To sum up many of the themes of this volume: We can’t transcendentally meditate our way to salvation. We can’t yoga educate our way to salvation. Neither can we ego inflate, intellectually hibernate, self-medicate, endlessly tolerate, scientifically innovate, sexually liberate, distinct gender conflate, mystically elevate, socially indoctrinate, shariah law capitulate, unwanted life exterminate, environmentally legislate, or totalitarian state our way to salvation. Salvation is found in Jesus Christ alone, in the gospel of his perfect life, in his sufficient death for otherwise helpless sinners, in his bodily resurrection, in his supreme and exhaustive Lordship over all of life (including the physical world he made and called good), and in his sovereign power to change hearts, causing us to increase and abound in love.
So how do we help our utopian neighbors? The simple child’s Sunday school answer to every question is the best answer here: Jesus. Let’s show them Jesus.
[1] The Roman Catholic Church is not completely Pelagian, but semi-Pelagian in its view of salvation. In this system we retain the ability (albeit a wounded ability) to choose God, a premise that found exaggerated emphasis in the sixteenth century. For analysis of Cassian’s thought and Roman Catholicism, see Rebecca Harden Weaver, Divine Grace and Human Agency: A Study of the Semi-Pelagian Controversy (Mercer: Mercer University Press, 1998),122.
[2] Martin Luther, Luther’s Works, vol. 34, 336-37.
[3] Francis Schaeffer, The God Who is There, 30th anniversary edition, (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1998) 124-125.
[4] I examine the philosophical, biblical, and practical credentials of this claim in Love, Freedom, and Evil: Does Authentic Love Require Free Will? (Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, 2011). See also Thaddeus Williams, “Paper Dolls: Vincent Brümmer’s Notion of Autonomy,” in Nederduitse Gereformeerde Teologiese Tydskrif, Vol. 53 No. 3 (2012), 228–38.
[5] As Tertullian recounts a nonbelieving culture’s commentary on the church, “See how they love one and how they are ready to die for one another” (The Apology, 39.7).
[6] See Raymond Brown, The Gospel According to John XIII—XXI, The Anchor Bible, vol. 29A (New York: Doubleday, 1970), 776.