I was a teenage fundamentalist - part seven

Are we saved to salve?

T

he seventh doctrine of The Salvation Army is a doozy. In 22 scants words it establishes a threefold process, involving all three members of the Godhead, which leads to salvation:

 

 ’We believe that repentance towards God, faith in our Lord Jesus Christ, and regeneration by the Holy Spirit, are necessary to salvation.’

Turning, restoring and changing. Believing, acting and living. Preparing, dreaming and renewing. It’s a doctrine that should delight any change theorist or futurist.
Many Salvationists subscribe to the belief that repentance, faith and regeneration are all ongoing experiences. An enormous amount of work has been done on the three stages of spiritual progression; I don’t intend to focus on them in this piece.

An awareness of our journey towards God, undertaken with God as our travelling companion, successfully helps us guard against our human tendency to form ‘club Salvo’ enclaves; it can also help Salvationists balance between the chasm of the great commission and Christ’s parable of the sheep and the goats.

This is the big ticket item for people who worship at the Salvation Army. It’s also the doctrinal payoff to this article; the notion that those processes (repentance, faith and regeneration), in cahoots with God, ‘are necessary to salvation’.

What’s ‘necessary’? Easily puzzled over; necessary is our get-out-of-jail-free card on life’s monopoly board. It’s John 3:16, writ large in Christ’s sacrificial life and death.
The much juicier, more debated query is ‘what’s salvation?’ What do we mean by the term?

There is currently in several countries (as has occurred periodically in our movement’s history) a big, rear-guard call for an ‘evangelism-first, ‘count the converts’ approach to The Salvation Army. As well as our normal processes of record keeping, in some territories Salvationists are being encouraged to tick off the total of buttocks on seats (duly dividing by two), to record those numbers of supplicants making public or private decisions to become Christians, as well as submitting the numeric totals of folks assisted financially and materially, through counselling and ministry of various hues.

It’s a worthy process, as (arguably) was King David’s divinely-unpopular inaugural census. The focus, of course, falls logically on both the journey and the outcome.
Whereas the founder once grumbled to his troops that ‘no-one gets a blessing if they have cold feet, and nobody ever got saved while they had toothache!’ (duly suggesting a spiritual emphasis and imperative to our social welfare efforts - a kind of John the Baptist ministry to go before the Spirit’s ministry of conversion and transformation), there is another school of thought that says we are rewarded for every cup of cold water given to the thirsty wayfarer.

Good juju, indeed, for every good deed done in Christ’s name, and for his sake.

The theological tug-of-war between interpretations of salvation is nothing new to Salvationists. In his paper William Booth: The Development of His Social Concern (2000), Lieut-Colonel Paul Bollwahn, (citing Roger Green), wrote that William Booth developed ‘a doctrine of redemption which embraced both spiritual and social redemption’. Booth’s dream of God’s salvation and his theological understanding of that salvation, Bollwahn surmised, had ‘deepened to where universal social redemption was as viable as the possibility of universal spiritual redemption…salvation was not only individual, personal, and spiritual; salvation was also social and physical’.

In the newly-released homage to General Eva Burrows (Rtd),  Hallmarks of The Salvation Army (edited by Colonel Henry Gariepy and Major Stephen Court, 2009), General John Larsson (Rtd) writes that by ‘the mid-1880s…The Army’s mission was not only soul salvation but whole salvation’.

It’s a big ambition, worthy of pursuers of a big Deity.

Citing a dizzying number of educational, nutritional, financial, medical, psychological, spiritual and societal programs done by Salvationists and Salvation Army staff, the former world leader says the movement’s mission is ‘truly war on a thousand fronts’ ‘The Army has proved it can do the impossible: fight successfully on a thousand fronts at the same time,’ he adds with beautiful optimism.

While I tend to think we are overcomplicating the process - we are saved through faith, ’so that none should boast’ - the doctrinal verbiage reminds us that salvation is not just a one-off decision to accept Christ and live as a Christian. Nor is it merely a process of gradually shucking off harmful habits and addictions, thereby reducing the damage we do to ourselves and to others. Life is more glorious, more generous than that existence. God’s grace, if lived out in our lives, is bigger than mere survival.

So, salvation is broader than pie in the sky when ya die; it’s also a recognition of being reconciled with the one who oversaw the merging of egg and seed during the very act of procreation. 

That awareness, that we are wonderfully and fearfully made, should bring us into a state of awe. If we are blasé about life then we are blasé about Love (my favourite nickname for God). Living and believing have to go together. Faith without works, as the apostle James wrote, is kaput. But equally works without faith is ultimately lacking.

For the Christian, there is no transcendence - no understanding of the human condition, no grasping of God in human flesh in Jesus - without a cheek-to-cheek dance with mystery.
This spiritual truth, perhaps ironically, was well captured by the 19th century Scottish satirist and historian, Thomas Carlyle. The cranky Romantic and lapsed Calvinist, in Sartor Resartus (The Tailor Retailored), wrote that ‘the man who cannot wonder, who does not habitually wonder (and worship)…is but a Pair of Spectacles behind which there is no Eye. Let those who have eyes look through him; then he may be useful.

‘Thou [who] wilt have no Mystery and Mysticism; wilt walk through thy world by the sunshine of what thou callest Truth, or even by the Hand-lamp of what I call Attorney-Logic [legalism]; and “explain” all, “account” for all, or believe nothing of it? ‘Nay, thou wilt attempt laughter; whoso recognises the unfathomable, all-pervading domain of Mystery [God], which is everywhere under our feet and among our hands; to whom the Universe is an Oracle and temple, as well as a Kitchen and cattle-stall.’

For those in our sphere of influence who may be tempted to try to rationalise their lives away, denying the ultimately-unknowable spiritual dimension of existence, Carlyle had this somewhat belligerent advice:

‘Retire into private places with thy foolish cackle; or, what were better, give it up, and weep, not that the reign of wonder is done [over], and God’s world all disembellished and prosaic, but that thou hitherto art a Dilettante and sandblind Pedant.’

Ouch.

Let’s pursue the mystery of God’s grace. We are saved to save, whatever form that desire and action may take in our own lives and in the lives of others.
We follow Christ, albeit stumblingly at times. As we get into 2010 let’s pray the scriptures and the Spirit guide our footsteps. 

 

Writer: Barry Gittins is a Melbourne-based writer, lifelong Salvationist, husband (to Trudy) and father(to Emily and Benjamin) who seeks God in everyday encounters. A frustrated poet and playwright, he has worked for the Salvos’ Australia Southern Territory in various roles since 1991: as a journalist (for Warcry, The Young Soldier/Kidzone, The Musician),technical writer and CD-ROM author in corps program (mission development), senior review editor (Warcry) and editor (On Fire). He currently works as a social program and policy consultant (writer/researcher) for the social program department.

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