9

Saved

Not long after my internship in the swamps of Florida, I moved to the Mississippi Delta to take a job as the director of student ministries at a Methodist church in Memphis, Tennessee. The church had a long-standing relationship with the United Methodist Church in Nicaragua. Well before I arrived, the Memphis congregation had been taking teams of adults to Nicaragua to build churches while sending money and other donations in the intervening time to help out however they could.

My second year in Memphis, our church’s Nicaragua team leader and I decided to make the annual Nicaragua trip a youth trip. I went to Nicaragua with him the summer before we planned on taking the teens. That way I could scope things out myself and get the lay of the land. Then together we spent the next year preparing and training our senior high students for the trip to Nicaragua. In many ways, it was your typical overseas short-term youth mission trip, though without the typical construction projects. We primarily led vacation Bible school programs for the children, feeding them and fellowshipping together over lunch each day. It was during lunch one of those days that something happened that forever changed my understanding not just of missions but of the gospel itself.

The lunch we served each day was typically the same—emphasis on served. We didn’t make the food. The women in the local church made it, which is why it smelled delicious and not—had we attempted to cook it—like a steaming pile of mystery garbage. The routine was the same every day. The women cooked the food while we sang songs, played games, and taught Bible lessons to the children. Once lunch was ready, all the children lined up to eat. It was always a bit chaotic at first, but the lunch line formed quickly, almost spontaneously. The kids knew the routine well, as we were hardly the first short-term mission team to come their way.

The food, usually some combination of rice and chicken or some other meat, was often served in a bag. This may sound odd to you, but it’s fairly typical of Nicaragua. If you drive up and down the streets of any major city in the country and come to a stop at a red light, someone will likely approach your window with a dozen or so bags filled with various fruit juices hanging from a pole. It looks weird to outsiders like you and me, and obviously people in Nicaragua do use cups, but bags are a cheap and efficient way to store and drink juice on the go. The same is true with food. While you’re more likely to find juice being sold in bags, those same bags worked just as well for lunch. And at a vacation Bible school, bags not only make for easy prep; they cut down on some of the mess that usually comes with kids and plates filled with food.

One day we were hosting vacation Bible school at a half-finished church outside the small mountain town of Estelí. (Half-finished might be a bit generous; it was a concrete foundation surrounded by cinderblock walls whose exposed steel skeleton reached unimpeded to the heavens, as the church still lacked a roof.)

The church itself was nestled in the heart of a small neighborhood. The houses in the neighborhood were roughly constructed wooden shacks, made from hand-hewn planks and topped with corrugated steel. The modest homes were lined sporadically across a handful of dirt roads. Some had electricity running to them, but many did not. All had dirt floors that were conspicuously well maintained by the women of the neighborhood, who could regularly be seen sweeping the floors of their homes, stopping only to smile and wave as we walked by. They may not have had much in that little mountainside neighborhood, but they took great pride in what they did have, and it showed.

When the announcement was made to line up for lunch, the kids in our half-built church dropped whatever they were doing and ran to get into line. At the same time, countless other children we didn’t even know were there emerged from the shadows of nearby houses and joined the frenzy. There was only space in the church’s makeshift kitchen for a couple of students to help serve at a time. So those of us who weren’t serving lunch either waited in line, chatting with the kids, or sat down to talk with them while they ate their lunch. Or at least tried to talk. Most of us didn’t speak much Spanish and most of them didn’t speak English, but the kids politely smiled and justifiably laughed as we tried to patch together our limited Spanish vocabulary into a fully formed sentence. Which rarely, if ever, happened.

The lunch line was chugging along when a youth worker and I noticed that every once in a while, a kid would grab a bag of food and, instead of finding a place to sit on the church floor, would dart outside and run away as fast as their little legs could carry them. Being oblivious American short-term missionaries, we were a little miffed. I mean, we had come all this way from Tennessee to hang out with them. Heck, we had even footed the bill for their lunch, and they didn’t even have the decency to say thank you, let alone stay and talk? The nerve! How were we going to save their souls if they wouldn’t hang around long enough to learn how sinful they were?

So after the fourth or fifth kid had darted out of the church, we decided to follow them, assuming they were probably gathering just around the corner with their co-conspirators, reveling in their mischief of having pulled one over on the dumb gringos.

We waited by the door of the church until our moment came. It didn’t take long before a small boy, maybe seven or eight years old, went running outside, blowing by us so fast we could barely keep up. Thankfully, for my pathetically out-of-shape self, he didn’t go far. We followed him down the road, around the corner, and down a small dirt path, thinking we were just moments away from stumbling upon the group of lunchtime hooligans we knew had to be lurking somewhere close by.

Then all of a sudden, he disappeared inside one of the small wooden houses.

From a distance, we couldn’t see exactly what was going on, but we could see what looked like another pair of hands reaching out from the darkness to take the bag of food.

“Aha! We’ve finally found them!” I thought to myself.

But as we got closer to the house, a bit of light began to break through the space between the corrugated steel roof and the wooden planks precariously holding it aloft. There wasn’t a lot of light, but there was enough to illuminate what was really going on.

There was indeed another set of hands reaching out to grab the bag of food, but they weren’t the hands of his co-conspirators.

They were the weathered hands of his mother. He was bringing his lunch home to share with her and his baby sister. It was likely the only meal they would have that day.

We stood frozen in our tracks, slack-jawed and dumbfounded. As we tried to regain our bearings, we looked around and realized this lunchtime ritual was playing itself out all throughout town. It was why all those kids grabbed their bags of food and ran away so quickly. And it broke me completely.

Even as I write this now, nearly a decade later, the tears flow as freely as they did that hot and humid afternoon in the Nicaraguan countryside. Tears of heartbreak that any family anywhere would live that close to the brink of starvation. And tears of humiliation and shame as it finally dawned on me just how privileged I really am, how ignorant I am of the struggles and hardships the rest of the world faces, and just how fundamentally I don’t understand the gospel.

I was there to save Nicaraguan souls, but what they really needed was their daily bread.

Salvation now

Before that moment, salvation, or “getting saved,” had always been something I thought of in strictly spiritual terms. Salvation affected my life in the here and now only insofar as it ensured I didn’t do this or that so that I could go to heaven after I died. Growing up, my family was far from well off, but I was a white, middle-class kid who never worried about where my next meal would come from, never thought twice about being able to afford a doctor’s visit, and never set foot on a dirt floor. The only thing I needed saving from was hell. The gospel was good news to me only because of what it did for me in eternity.

I was a pastor and lifelong Christian when I went to Nicaragua, but I was still clueless about the gospel. I was clueless about why Jesus called the gospel good news for the poor (Luke 4:18). I was clueless that “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven” was anything more than a fancy way of saying “Bring on the second coming!” I had no real need for the kingdom to come in my life. I had my daily bread. My life was comfortable, safe, privileged. The only thing I thought I needed saving from was an eternity in hell.

I had long ago asked Jesus into my heart, but he had stayed there. Transformation, to me, was about making a person sinless, entirely sanctified, perfect. It never occurred to me that transformation might be something that happens here and now in ways other than not drinking, swearing, or having premarital sex.

I didn’t understand the real promise of the end times, because I didn’t understand the sort of salvation it was promising. I didn’t understand that the salvation it promises isn’t waiting till the end of time; it’s breaking into the here and now, on earth as it is in heaven. My faith had been so self-centered and so spiritualized that aside from imparting a great deal of guilt and shame, it had no real effect on my life in the present. For all my self-professed expertise on the gospel and the end times, it turned out I knew very little about either. This boy and his family and his entire neighborhood understood what made the promises of Jesus good news far better than I did or ever could. They were the ones who had been blessed and told that theirs is the kingdom of God. They were the ones who understood the hope that came with Jesus’ promise that the first would be made last. They were the ones who could truly appreciate the coming of a new world where pain and sorrow are no more, where every tear is wiped away and the tree of life is open to all so that none go hungry ever again. They understood that salvation and the hope of Revelation are good news because of what they promise in the here and now, not just after we die.

I knew nothing. For me, Christianity was a religion of ideas and the end times a puzzle to figure out. I was so fixated on avoiding hell and not being left behind that I never stopped to consider anyone’s needs but my own. My faith had been unraptured long before I went to Nicaragua. But when I watched that little boy give up his lunch to feed his family—people I had come to “save”—the rest of my faith began to unravel too. I realized just how little I really understood about salvation, and how clueless I was about what made the gospel truly good news.

I had left the rapture behind, but I hadn’t abandoned the rapture mentality. Christianity, for me, was still all about getting to heaven. The myopic focus of end-times theology is but the by-product of the American Christianity that has fostered it for so long—a Christianity focused on the future like a zero-sum game, a faith so overspiritualized and focused on heaven that it has no practical relevance for the here and now. So even though I had abandoned the rapture, I never really gave up the mentality from which it sprang.

That’s why folks like the families in that small mountain town in Nicaragua understand the book of Revelation far better than I ever did or will. It was written to people like them: people in need of hope and salvation, not from eternity in hell, but the hell of this life—the hell of poverty, oppression, and injustice. People who know what hunger is and can actually appreciate the miracle of being able to eat freely from the tree of life. People who by accident of birth don’t have the “right” nationality, “right” skin color, “right” socioeconomic standing, or “right” language and are effectively barred from participating in the economic and social systems that gave me comfort and privilege. It’s almost as if they hadn’t even been given a chance to take the mark of the beast so they could buy and sell and have a shot at a comfortable life. I, on the other hand, bore the mark obliviously. Born by chance into the privilege of the empire, I never stopped to consider that so many of the opportunities I take for granted every day are out of reach for countless people simply because of who they are, where they’re from, and what they look like.

I always thought gold streets and pearly gates sounded neat, like icing on the cake of my well-deserved heavenly mansion. I couldn’t even begin to imagine the hope those iconic images inspired in people whose floors were literally made of dirt and whose walls were built from whatever scraps of wood they could scavenge together. When Jesus said he came to proclaim good news to the poor, set the prisoner free, heal the sick, and rescue the oppressed, I thought he was being poetic. That family in Nicaragua heard a gospel whose good news didn’t wait for them on the other side of death, but affected their lives now to transform and save them from the hells of poverty, oppression, racism, and injustice.

It had been nearly a decade since I lost my faith in the rapture, but Nicaragua taught me that I still had plenty of my end-times faith left to be unraptured. Being raptured hadn’t been my goal in a long time, but I still saw getting to heaven as the whole point of being a Christian. Christianity was still all about me and my eternal reward. After that day in Nicaragua, I had to face the fact that I hadn’t just been wrong about the rapture. I had been wrong about Christianity, wrong about the gospel, wrong about salvation, wrong about what it means to be a follower of Jesus. Christianity wasn’t all about me and my reward. It couldn’t be that self-centered and that self-serving. If it was, it wouldn’t be worthy of bearing the name of Christ.

So if the rapture was no longer my hope, and heaven alone wasn’t the goal of salvation, then what was left?

What was the point of being saved?

What was the point of being a Christian at all?

Red-letter Christianity

To my surprise, the answers to my post-rapture questions of faith came not from a theology book, but from an old man with a spitting problem.

That man was Tony Campolo. Campolo is a professor emeritus at Eastern University and a prolific speaker, writer, and former spiritual advisor to President Bill Clinton. When I first heard him speak at the National Youth Workers Convention, I was familiar enough with his reputation to know not to sit too close. Campolo is notorious for spitting when he talks. Not on purpose, obviously, but the guy is a one-man Bellagio fountain when he talks. That night a group of smart-aleck youth workers staked out front row seats for Campolo’s talk and arrived dressed in yellow ponchos to protect them from the imminent saliva storm. Campolo got a good kick out of it.

The theme of Campolo’s talk that night was the same theme he’s preached on for years: red-letter Christianity. It’s the same theme that led him and Shane Claiborne to create an organization called Red Letter Christians. As the name implies, it’s a conviction that the words of Jesus that are often represented in red letters in our Bibles should drive our understanding of the gospel and, with it, the Christian life. In other words, our understanding of Christianity should fundamentally be a red-letter theology.

“But what about Paul and the rest of the New Testament?” you ask. Or at least I did that night, in the form of a snarky text message to Campolo I started to type out when he opened the floor to digital questions. The short answer is, Campolo and Claiborne love the apostle Paul. They love the rest of the Bible too. They’re not dismissing Paul or any other part of Scripture. What they’re trying to do is live like Christ as authentically as they can. To do that, they make the actual words and teachings of Jesus, the red letters, the lens through which they understand not just the rest of the Bible, but the faith itself.

But I was too busy that night trying to formulate my snarky text message to hear that explanation. I was just about to hit “send” on my phone when Campolo began telling a story that made me forget all about trying to anonymously debate him and had me considering the possibility that maybe they were onto something with their whole “let’s take the words and actions of Jesus seriously” pitch.

The story Campolo told that night was of a meeting he once had with a student and the student’s father. I’ve since heard other people tell a similar story, so perhaps it was more anecdote than autobiography. Or maybe it’s just a common occurrence when people come face-to-face with something Jesus said that they don’t like. Either way, as he told the story, the student’s dad was angry with Campolo for teaching all that red-letter nonsense in class. Or more accurately, he was angry that his son was taking it too seriously—especially the stuff about nonviolence and giving what you have to the poor. The father had demanded a meeting with Campolo to find out exactly what he was teaching his son and whether it really was as “extreme” as what his son was telling him.

So Campolo calmly explained red-letter theology to the father, and the father not-so-calmly let him know what he thought. “I’m a Christian too,” he said, “and I’m fine with all of that stuff in the red letters. But only up to a point!”

“And what point is that?” his son interjected. “The cross?”

It was as if that kid had reached out of the story and punched me right in the stomach.

Here I was, texting away with my theologically superior insight, when I suddenly came face-to-face with two realizations: one, I was far more passionate about talking about faith than living it out; and two, as much as I’d like to be the student with the zinger, the reality is I was much more like his dad, following Jesus . . . up to a point. For me, that point was turning my faith into real, Christlike action. I mean, feeding the homeless at Christmas or going on a short-term mission trip or faking a famine for thirty hours with my youth group? I was there. But real, lasting Christlike action in the way I lived and moved and had my being in the world each and every day? Not so much.

Naturally, I was mad at Campolo for his surprise checkmate right when I was trying to checkmate him with my text message. But I was also intrigued. So when I got back to my office at church the next week, I decided to do a little digging and find out what else this crazy, spitting preacher had to say.

Judgment day

My search led me to YouTube, that great bastion of randomly uploaded videos. It wasn’t quite as vast back then as it is today, but it was still wide enough in scope to house a few Tony Campolo videos. I found several clips of him going more in depth about what it means to be a red-letter Christian. And then I found the one video that I still can’t stop quoting to this day.

It was an interview Campolo gave to a Canadian television show called The Hour. The show opened, as most talk shows do, with the host introducing Campolo. The two of them chitchatted about Campolo’s time as spiritual advisor to the president before they started talking about Red Letter Christians. And that’s when Campolo began to rebuild my shattered understanding of the gospel and salvation.

The only description that Jesus gives of judgment day is how we treated the poor. On that day, he’s not going to ask you theological questions. He’s going to ask—you know, it’s not going to be “Virgin birth? Strongly agree? Agree? Disagree? Strongly disagree?” You know . . . it’s going to be, here’s what it’s going to be—the twenty-fifth chapter of Matthew: “I was hungry. Did you feed me? I was naked. Did you clothe me? I was sick. Did you care for me? I was an alien. Did you take me in? What you failed to do to the least of these you failed to do unto me, because I’m not up in the sky somewhere, I’m waiting to be loved in people who hurt, and as you relate to people who hurt, you’re relating to me.” There is no Christianity that does not tie us up with the poor and the oppressed of the world.¹

Here, at long last, staring me right in the face, was the key to surviving judgment day. I had spent so many years trying to find it, trying to figure out how to make sure my name was written in the book of life. I had searched high and low, turned to every expert I could find, but the answer wasn’t written in black-and-white propositions of theological dogma. It was in the red letters of Jesus. The answer was here, in the words of Christ, who could actually tell me with real authority what would happen on judgment day.

According to Jesus himself, when judgment day finally rolls around, he won’t be standing at the pearly gates, asking us what we believe; he’ll be asking us what we did. Specifically, he’ll ask how we cared for the least of these. My theology should inspire me to care for the least of these. If it doesn’t, then I can have all the right theological answers but still not love my neighbor. In that event, I will find myself shouting back to Jesus like a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal: “Lord, when did I see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?”

This was a radically different version of both salvation and faith than I was accustomed to. As I had understood it, Jesus died to save me and to keep me from going to hell. My job was to “accept” that gift by not sinning too much so I could go to heaven. But here, in the Little Apocalypse of Matthew 25, I saw a version of Christianity defined by earthly concerns. It was a form of salvation focused not on me and what I believed but on others and how they were cared for.

If what Jesus said in Matthew 25 is true, then Christianity isn’t defined by the sort of individual, personal relationship with Jesus that I had always been told was what makes Christianity so great. If the red letters of Matthew’s apocalypse are true, then Christianity is about a communal relationship with Jesus and the ones he came to serve and save. Christianity is personal; it’s just not private. It’s personal in the sense that it drives us towards loving, personal relationships with others. Salvation isn’t about “Jesus and me.” It’s about us and all of creation. Which makes sense if you think about it: to be Christian is to be Christlike, and Christ came not for himself but to give his life for others because God so loved the world.

If the apocalyptic vision of Matthew 25 is true, then serving others isn’t a secondary response to our salvation; it’s how we are saved. Not in the sense of how I get to heaven, but in the true biblical sense of salvation. Salvation isn’t an individual reward but a creation-wide act of God’s grace into which we’ve been invited to participate by incarnating God’s love to the lost, the least, and the dying. If following Jesus means being Christlike, and if Christ came to incarnate the love and grace of God to a broken world, it only makes sense that salvation wouldn’t be a moment of instantaneous personal reward. Salvation is an invitation to die with Christ to our self-centeredness in order to devote our lives to others and their needs just as he did. In this way we are all together transformed through the power of the Holy Spirit into the new creation promised in Revelation and realized in the resurrection.

Faith or faithfulness?

If you grew up a red-blooded American Protestant Christian like me, then this probably sounds like the dreaded works-based salvation we were taught to despise. We were told that Christianity was all about a personal relationship with Jesus, that all you had to do to be saved was believe, say the Sinner’s Prayer, confess your belief in Jesus, and you would go to heaven. But that understanding of salvation is a fairly recent development in the history of the Christian faith. How Christians understand salvation has evolved over time. How people think we are saved today hasn’t always been how people throughout history have thought we are saved.

Jesus himself changed the salvation paradigm from the sacrificial system that came before him. But that wasn’t the last time the people of God’s understanding of salvation changed. In fact, salvation in the Judeo-Christian tradition doesn’t actually start with the sacrificial system. After all, many people came before the sacrificial system was institutionalized in the law of Moses: people like Joseph, Sarah, and Abraham. The Christian faith considers them all to be “saved,” so to speak, but not because they made the correct atoning sacrifices. So how were they saved? The writer of Hebrews tells us it was their faithfulness to God’s calling, not their adherence to a list of rules or set of beliefs that didn’t yet exist, that “saved” them (see Hebrews 11). This emphasis on actions rather than ideas is important to keep in mind as we begin to rethink salvation in light of the apocalypse, because it reveals what biblical faith is all about. Biblical faith is not defined by rules, rituals, or ideas; it’s about faithfulness to a calling from God.

Of course, the law of Moses did eventually arrive, and with it a new path to salvation—or more accurately, atonement. The law of Moses laid out in detail what would keep the people of God in right standing with God. Some 613 commandments in the Torah told them what they would need to do or not do and what sacrifices they would need to make to get back in right standing—atone for their sins—when they screwed up. Curiously, heaven doesn’t really come into play here or really anywhere throughout the Old Testament. The people of Israel certainly believed in the existence of heaven, but going there wasn’t the goal. In fact, the Old Testament includes only a few mentions of people going to heaven, and they were taken there directly by God while they were still alive. Faithfulness for the sake of faithfulness, and the better life now that came from that faithfulness, was the “goal.” Going to some otherworldly paradise or avoiding eternal conscious torment? These simply don’t appear in the Old Testament.

When Jesus shows up on the scene, the history of salvation takes another dramatic turn. When he was crucified, the veil in the temple, symbolically separating the people from their God, was torn apart. Access to God was now open to all. The sacrifices once required for atonement are no longer required, according to the apostle Paul, because Jesus was the final atoning sacrifice. Through his sacrifice we are all forgiven and brought back into right relationship with God. Yet Paul describes how we are saved in a fascinating way. Salvation is, Paul writes, “not by the works of the law, but by faith in Jesus Christ” (Galatians 2:16). In this passage, Paul uses the Greek term pistis Christou, which has often been translated “faith in Jesus Christ.” Some biblical scholars suggest, however, that a better rendering of Paul’s words would be “faith of Jesus” rather than “faith in Jesus.”² Better still would be to translate pistis Christou as “faithfulness of Jesus.” At first glance, this may seem like an insignificant detail, the kind of thing scholars like to dissect. But the implications for our understanding of salvation are enormous. It’s not our belief in right ideas that saves us, but rather Jesus’ faithfulness in following the will of his Father, even to the point of the cross. It’s the same sort of faithfulness the patriarchs exhibited before the law of Moses was even given.

For Paul, faithfulness doesn’t stop at the cross. As he says in Philippians, we are called to that same faithfulness, called to have the same mind in us that was in Christ Jesus that “though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross” (Philippians 2:6-8). For Paul, having the same mind as Christ doesn’t mean believing the exact same ideas as everyone in the pew next to us. It means pursuing the same way of life, the same sort of faithfulness to God’s calling that Jesus embodied.

James builds on this understanding of faithfulness—answering God’s calling to a particular way of life—in his own epistle, in which he famously says that faith alone does not save us, for faith without works is dead (see James 2:14-26). When many of us hear the word works today in the context of salvation, we’ve been conditioned to think about actions intended to win God’s approval through moral perfection. But when James talks about works, he’s not talking about the sort of rituals, or works, of the law of Moses that were intended to make atonement with God and which Paul said Jesus replaced the need for when he writes in Romans that “a person is justified by faith apart from works prescribed by the law” (Romans 3:28). There’s another kind of works mentioned in the New Testament, and it’s the kind that James is talking about here. The works James describes are better understood in English as faithfulness, the kind of faithfulness that Jesus and the patriarchs embodied. Faithfulness is a work of faith defined not by adherence to religious rituals or by intellectual assent to a list of beliefs, but by a particular way of life that is faithful to God’s calling—especially God’s call to love God with all our heart, mind, and soul, and our neighbor as ourselves (Matthew 22:36-40). By being faithful to this calling to love our neighbor, we’re not trying to win God’s approval or love. We already have God’s love, by virtue of God’s loving nature. We love our neighbors not as a means to our own end of getting to heaven but as an end itself. To love them simply for the sake of trying to win God’s approval would be to objectify our neighbors by turning them into a means to an end. If we did that, we would still be doing the sort of ritualistic “works” of the law that Paul says won’t justify us with God anyway.

Unfortunately, this sort of nuanced balance between belief and putting that belief into practice was lost over time, and the church found itself back in a place where religious rituals, or “works,” were once again taught to be required for salvation. Selling indulgences is one example. This is the sort of thing Martin Luther railed against and why he was so emphatic about salvation by faith alone. That zealousness was not without problems, though, for Luther decried James as a “gospel of straw” and wanted it cut out of the Bible for its emphasis on works. The legacy of Luther’s distaste for James has turned the book’s testimony about the critical importance of works into an awkward part of the New Testament for Protestants rather than an important reminder to live out our beliefs.

Luther’s legacy, Protestantism, centered on the doctrine of salvation by faith alone, an idea that continues to be not only embraced but celebrated by countless Christians today. But the history of salvation didn’t end with Luther. If anything, Luther’s ideas laid the foundation for yet another development in the history of salvation. Centuries later, as the Western world found itself in the throes of the Industrial Revolution, salvation by faith alone came to its logical, literal conclusion. The revivalism of nineteenth-century America transformed salvation once more. The Industrial Revolution transformed the way we think about life, particularly in regards to time. Journeys that once took weeks on horseback could now be completed in days on a train. Manufactured goods that once required several days to make by hand could be created in a single afternoon thanks to the advent of the assembly line. But industrialization didn’t just transform transportation and manufacturing. It transformed society as well. It transformed us into an on-demand people who expected to get places quickly and have what we want immediately. The church was not immune from this transformation. The church’s approach to salvation soon began to mirror the same sort of assembly line logic, demand for immediacy, and focus on the bottom line of the Industrial Revolution. By taking salvation by faith alone at its literal word—that is to say all that is required for salvation is belief—salvation became an industrial process as the way of Jesus was streamlined and ultimately replaced with an easy-to-follow and incredibly efficient system guaranteed to produce salvation every time.

Folks like the evangelist Charles Finney created salvation factories, of sorts, with their own assembly lines. Meeting at first in the theaters of New York City and then spreading out to revivals in towns across the country, Finney would bring a sinner up to the stage, where the sinner would sit in a chair, known as the mourner’s bench, and confess his or her sins. Confession made, salvation was had, and it was on to the next sinner, who would come on stage and take a seat in the chair. Replace the stage with a sanctuary, and the chair with an altar to kneel at, and you have a typical Sunday morning at any evangelical church in America today.

In the holiness tradition in which I was raised, Phoebe Palmer took things a step further and declared that “the altar sanctifies the gift,” meaning a visit to the altar was enough to be instantly and entirely cleansed of sin, or as Nazarenes like me call it, entirely sanctified. Palmer and Finney were far from the only ones promoting a streamlined version of salvation focused on the bottom line of getting to heaven. Countless other evangelists and preachers contributed to this sort of reductionist version of salvation. Regardless of where we trace its origins, the result of the various incarnations of American Christianity was that salvation by faith alone became Christianity by right belief alone. Christianity was individualized, internalized, and spiritualized. Discipleship was replaced by a moment of decision. The way of Jesus was replaced with the Sinner’s Prayer. Salvation became a zero-sum game in which all that mattered was avoiding hell, and doing that became as simple as saying a few magic words at an altar. A particular way of life no longer really mattered, because it was no longer ultimately necessary for salvation. Sure, we’ll say we need to act like Christians and we’re quick to condemn people for not conforming to whatever our particular version of cultural Christianity dictates—like no smoking, drinking, or getting tattoos. But the rest of our life belies the truth that faith excuses a multitude of sins.

This is how 81 percent of white American evangelical voters can support someone like Donald Trump whose words, actions, and policies are so radically antithetical to the way of Jesus. The disconnect between faith and faithfulness means self-professed Christians can support all sorts of unchristian things without feeling hypocritical because their Christian faith (and personal salvation) is ultimately determined by what they believe, not by how they live. None of the doing of Christianity matters when the only concern is getting to heaven.

Dispensationalism grows in the fertile soil of a faith whose focus is on the afterlife and having all the right answers. The “ends justify the means” ethics of end-times theology is a natural outgrowth of an individualized, internalized, and spiritualized version of salvation. So end-times theology isn’t the disease that needs to be eradicated in order for Christianity to rediscover what it truly means to follow Jesus. It’s just a symptom of a much deeper problem—namely, the disconnect between the Christian faith and the Christian life. For in its pursuit of escape from the earth, end-times theology reveals a problem that runs throughout Protestantism in general and American Christianity in particular: a self-centered Christianity exhausted by simply agreeing that a certain list of doctrines are true.

The irony is that, properly understood, end-times theology can rescue the church from an individualized and overspiritualized understanding of salvation. For what we see in John’s apocalypse is the apocalyptic truth of Matthew 25 unveiled. Now, Revelation does not directly quote Matthew 25, as it does some of the Old Testament prophets, but the call of Matthew 25, and the consequences for not heeding that call, shape the first several chapters of Revelation. There are echoes of Matthew 25 at the end of John’s apocalypse as well, when Jesus declares, “My reward is with me, and I will give to each person according to what they have done” (Revelation 22:12 NIV).

The first chapters of Revelation don’t get as much attention as the rest of Revelation, at least not in dispensational circles. But if we take another look at the letters contained within them and let those letters become the framework for understanding the rest of Revelation, as John intended them to be, the curtain begins to be pulled back on the message of Revelation in general and salvation in particular. They emphasize the importance of “works” when it comes to the last judgment while also setting the time frame for the message of Revelation as the present, rather than the distant future. Everything that John warns is to come is directly connected to and dependent upon what happens “now.”

In six of the seven letters found in the opening chapters of Revelation, Jesus, speaking through John, says, “I know your works,” and in the letter to Thyatira he specifically says, “I will give to each of you as your works deserve” (Revelation 2:23). It’s a theme that’s repeated throughout the book of Revelation: the idea that punishment and rewards would be doled out not on the basis of affirmation of faith but according to how faithful the early church was to God’s calling not just to preach but to live out the good news of the gospel. In other words, as anathema as it might sound to Protestant ears, according to Revelation, salvation is fundamentally connected to what we do in this life, not just what we believe.

This didn’t create as much tension for John’s original audience as it does for Protestant audiences today. For one, “works”-based salvation had a strong foundation in Jewish theology, as we can see in both the sacrificial system and the various rites and rituals that were required of the people of Israel. Paul certainly emphasized the role of faith in salvation, but the role of works in living out that faith wouldn’t be as contradictory as we’ve been conditioned to believe. The work Paul rejected as necessary for salvation was not the working out of our faith by loving and serving our neighbor, but rather the “works prescribed by the law.”³ It’s this subtle but important distinction that is the key to resolving any tension between works and faith as they pertain to salvation. When we talk about “works” pejoratively, we usually mean the kinds of rites and rituals required by the law of Moses, the law that Paul says we are no longer under because of God’s grace. But as Jesus lays out in Matthew 25, work or effort is very much involved in salvation, just a different kind of work: the work of loving and serving the least of these.

The tension, then, between Paul’s teaching on faith alone and James’s declaration that faith without works is dead, can be resolved if we substitute the word love for works. After all, love is what all the works required by the law and the prophets hang on, according to Jesus (Matthew 22:40). Incarnated love is what the prophets called the people of God to embody; the incarnated love of God in the form of Jesus is what saves us; and the absence or presence of incarnated love is what the churches of Revelation are either chastised or praised for. Or to put it another way, it’s the love of the Father that creates us, the love of the Son that saves us, and the love of the Spirit that compels us to love one another. This doesn’t negate the role of faith, because biblical faith doesn’t reside only in the mind; it is lived out in the form of faithfulness or acts of faith—specifically, acts of love. In that way, “faith alone” does still save us. This approach also explains why Paul’s teaching that faith is the mechanism of salvation became a matter of such heated debate in the early church. It wasn’t just that he was ministering to Gentiles and welcoming them into the people of God because of what they believed. The uproar Paul encountered in his ministry came about because he was redefining what was required to be or live as the people of God. He wasn’t dismissing the role of works so much as redefining them—just as Jesus did with the greatest commandment and his description of the last judgment.

It’s this reimagining that John echoes in Revelation. Works are critical in the book of Revelation, not just because they are how our eternal fate is determined in the last judgment, but because these new works usher in or have ushered in or should have ushered in (depending on which church is being addressed) a new way of life. This is why Jesus continually says, “I know your works” to the seven churches. The people in these communities of faith have been called to live a particular way in the last days, and are not to simply sit around and wait for Jesus to return and make everything better.

The reason most of us reject works when we talk about salvation is not just because of a few verses in Paul’s epistle, but because we’ve been taught that salvation requires perfection, and because we could never be perfect in our actions. No matter how many good works we do, we need Jesus’ perfection to save us. But salvation in the Bible was never about moral perfection. It couldn’t be. Only God is perfect. Salvation in the Bible is always about right relationship between us and God lived out through right relationship with our neighbors.

Which is why the sort of works-based salvation that Revelation teaches and Jesus describes in his Little Apocalypse of Matthew 25 describe our relationships with others, not how perfect we are. The same is true throughout the New Testament whenever the subject of works comes up as they relate to salvation. The works that James and Jesus and John and even Paul had in mind weren’t about moral perfection; they were about love. We don’t have to be perfect to love one another. Rather, it’s that love that perfects us. As we love one another as God first loved us, we fulfill Jesus’ command to “be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matthew 5:48) because the heavenly Father is perfect love.

This is why when Revelation talks about salvation and works there is never a demand for perfection, just effort. Moral perfection is never even hinted at in John’s apocalypse. And in the epistle of James, which is so famously adamant about the role of works, perfection isn’t something we achieve; it’s a gift from God. Trying to love our neighbors is what matters, not doing it perfectly all the time. Being Christlike doesn’t mean being perfect. It means incarnating love as Jesus incarnated love for us, rather than keeping that love to ourselves. Revelation, James, and the Little Apocalypse of Matthew 25 are so emphatic about “works” because salvation is something God is doing in and through us—not just to save our souls but to redeem and restore the entire world. “Works” are critical in how Revelation, James, and Jesus teach salvation not because the work of loving and serving the least of these is what saves us. Rather, the work of loving and serving the least of these is what we’ve been saved to do.

Maybe we have been left behind

Many of us have been taught to understand salvation as the finish line of our faith and heaven as the reward for crossing over. But salvation isn’t a finish line. It’s just the beginning of our journey of faith. Jesus doesn’t tell his followers, “Okay, now you’re saved; go in peace.” He says, “Come and follow me.” Salvation is an invitation to participate in something much bigger and greater than ourselves. That’s what we see in the Gospels, and it’s also what we see in Revelation. Revelation is bringing to fruition the call Jesus left his disciples with when he went before them to prepare for the coming of the kingdom of God (see John 14:1-4). But Jesus didn’t leave them behind to sit around and wait for his return. Jesus told his disciples, “Go and do likewise” (Luke 10:37). They were to go and do as he had done, and Jesus promised to send his Holy Spirit to guide and empower them as they carried out the work of the gospel. Salvation was never meant to be an escape plan. Salvation is an invitation. We are saved to serve neighbor and enemy alike so that through that act of love, through incarnating God’s love to the world, we help bring heaven to earth.

So end-times theology does get one thing right. We have been left behind—just not in the way we have been led to believe.

We haven’t been left behind by Jesus as a punishment. We’ve been left behind with a calling: to bring the good news to the poor in every corner of creation, to care for the least of these wherever and whoever they may be, and to lay the groundwork for the kingdom of God coming down to earth as it is in heaven. This is why, when the disciples asked Jesus to teach them how to pray, Jesus taught them how to live. That is, after all, what prayer is really all about: formation. When we pray, it’s not just idle talk or pleading. Prayer reminds us of what is important and what needs to be done. Prayer compels us to become God’s agents of grace in the world.

At the heart of the Lord’s Prayer is a cry and a calling that completely upends rapture theology: “Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven” (Matthew 6:10 NIV). The prayer functions as an extension, a reminder, of Jesus’ message. Jesus brought the kingdom of God with him, and it is the disciples’ job to spread that kingdom to the very ends of the earth after his resurrection.

Rapture theology does the opposite of the Lord’s Prayer. It’s not focused on bringing the kingdom of God to earth, because its primary concern is escaping the earth. If the earth will be destroyed and Jesus will do all the work of making things new, why bother worrying about it now? The Left Behind books make this rejection of the Lord’s Prayer in a subtle but powerful way: every member of the Tribulation Force carries a gun, but not once in the entire series do they ever say the Lord’s Prayer.⁴ The Lord’s Prayer is key to understanding both the gospel of Jesus and life in the last days because it’s a prayer of salvation both for the one saying the prayer and for the entire world. Revelation isn’t an afterword to the Bible. It’s the answer to the Lord’s Prayer. When the old order of things passes away and there is no more sorrow or mourning or hunger or death, and when the powerful have been made low, and when the last have become first—then God’s kingdom will have come down to earth as it is in heaven.

But praying for that day to come is not an idle calling. It is, like salvation itself, an invitation to participate in the process by living out what we pray. As a vision of the promise of God’s redemptive love fulfilled, Revelation serves as a guide for the present to help us live the kind of life that begins to bring that heavenly kingdom to earth. The firstfruits of that work began when Jesus walked out of the tomb on Easter morning. After his ascension, we were left behind to see that work through until his return, when Jesus will bring that work to completion. But as John and Paul saw, Jesus’ resurrection means our work and the promise of Revelation aren’t two separate events. Jesus’ resurrection means that the work of ushering in a new heaven and a new earth has already begun.

We really are living in the last days, as my professor tried to explain to me years ago—the days when God is at work in the world, healing and redeeming all creation. The last days don’t start after a fictional rapture, when God finally shows up so the process of reconciliation can begin and end at the same time. The last days started when Jesus was resurrected. They end when he returns.

As much as this sort of approach to the last days differs from end-times theology, it isn’t a radically new idea. It’s as old as the Christian faith itself, because it comes directly from the New Testament. By centering the Matthew 25 call to apocalyptic love, people like Tony Campolo aren’t doing something new. They’re just preaching the gospel.

Fundamentally, apocalyptic love is what the gospel is all about. This kind of incarnated love reveals the good news and resurrecting power of Jesus at work in the present, because it makes loving people rather than ideas the center of the Christian life.

At the heart of the gospel is the incarnation of divine apocalyptic love. The incarnation proclaims the good news that God didn’t stay disconnected and disinterested, far away in heaven. God put on flesh and dwelled among us, became one of us to know us better. Through that incarnated grace, God redeems all creation. Rapture theology is the opposite of incarnation. It’s all about escape. It’s about getting away from here and over to there. It’s about leaving behind the earth and everyone in it for heaven.

The incarnation is about bringing heaven to earth. It’s about God coming down to where the trials and tribulations are, not leaving God’s people behind to suffer alone. That’s where salvation is found: in the reconciling of all things back to their Creator, in the making new of all things, in love putting on flesh. It’s a process that began with the resurrection of Jesus and which we are invited to participate in by taking up our own crosses, dying to self, and following him.

This is why salvation requires work—not the kinds of rituals and sacrifices spelled out in the law, but the harder work of loving our neighbors and enemies alike. This is also why salvation is based on love alone: the love of God that saves us, and our love for God, which responds to that first act of love by loving our neighbor. That kind of love takes work. Not perfect work, just work. It’s about doing the work of Matthew 25, work as it’s understood in the greatest commandment—the kind of works James said are required to keep faith alive. It’s the work of love, of incarnating the love of Christ to the least of these wherever they are, whomever they are, and in whatever way they may need the love of Christ.

Apocalyptic love isn’t a warm fuzzy kind of love that makes us feel good about ourselves or affectionate toward others. Nor is it the kind of love that stays hidden in our hearts like faith stuck in our heads. It’s the kind of love that boy in Nicaragua showed to his family, the kind of love his entire community needs us to show to them—love in the form of bread and shelter, clothing and medicine. It’s the transcendent love of God made present in the here and now. It’s the kind of love that reveals the truth of Revelation, because in those acts of love, the former things begin to pass away, as through us God continues to make all things new.

It’s the kind of love the prophet Martin Luther King Jr. proclaimed in the final sermon he gave before he was struck down by an assassin’s bullet.

It’s all right to talk about long white robes over yonder, in all its symbolism. But ultimately people want some suits and dresses and shoes to wear down here. It’s all right to talk about streets flowing with milk and honey, but God has commanded us to be concerned about the slums down here and his children who can’t eat three square meals a day. It’s all right to talk about the new Jerusalem, but one day, God’s preacher must talk about the new New York, the new Atlanta, the new Philadelphia, the new Los Angeles, the new Memphis, Tennessee. This is what we have to do.⁵