3
SO GREAT SALVATION
(Or, The Depth of the Gospel)
The things of the gospel are depths. The things of the gospel . . . are the deep things of God.
THOMAS GOODWIN
How shall we escape, if we neglect so great salvation?
HEBREWS 2:3 (kjv )
Usually evangelicals get only a few steps down the road of theological reflection before they begin asking for reassurances that the trip is going to be worthwhile. They often express this in the curt question, Is this necessary for salvation? Bad motives may lurk behind such a question: shortsighted pragmatism, intellectual laziness, a desire to reduce everything in Christianity to the bare minimum of experiential, and preferably emotional, accessibility. There’s no use denying that these traits do exist in evangelical churches, and formally the question itself is dismayingly similar to the questions, Will this be on the test? and Can I get to heaven without thinking about this?
But the question also gives voice to a deep-seated evangelical instinct that is surely right. Everything in the Christian faith should be connected, clearly and directly, to the one central thing, the gospel of salvation in Christ. If there is not the closest possible connection between Trinity and gospel, then arguments about Trinitarian patterns latent in Bible study (chap. 6) and prayer (chap. 7) are relatively insignificant. These church practices would point to interesting social phenomena in a certain subculture but would not touch the heart of evangelical existence, the central point that gives life to all the rest—salvation.
Anybody who wants to win the hearts of evangelicals will have to talk about salvation, because that’s where evangelical hearts are. They are gospel people or they are nothing. When they are confronted with a complex doctrine, as the doctrine of the Trinity undeniably is, they quickly become restless and demand some proof that the intellectual journey they’re being invited to undertake is actually going to pay off in terms of understanding the gospel. The central claim of this book is that the Trinity is the gospel. Seeing how closely these two go together depends on seeing both Trinity and gospel as clearly as possible, in a large enough perspective to discern their overall forms. When the outlines of both are clear, we should experience the shock of recognition: Trinity and gospel have the same shape! This is because the good news of salvation is ultimately that God opens his Trinitarian life to us. Every other blessing is either a preparation for that or a result of it, but the thing itself is God’s graciously taking us into the fellowship of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, to be our salvation. It will take the next three chapters to develop the entire argument, examining the size of the gospel, the shape of the gospel, and the crucial point of access by which we are brought into the gospel. This chapter takes up only the first of those tasks.
THE SIZE OF THE GOSPEL
To discern the size of anything, you have to be able to locate its edges. Where are the edges of the gospel, and what is its size? J. B. Phillips once wrote a book with such a great title that people feel enlightened simply by hearing it, whether they go on to read the book or not. The book is good, but it can hardly measure up to its own name, which is Your God Is Too Small. Those five syllables jar the mind with the suggestion of something inconceivably vast and free and at the same time the danger of settling for a pale imitation of it. I have often thought about writing a book with the title Your Gospel Is Too Small, and as G. K. Chesterton once said, “Like every book I never wrote, it is by far the best book I have ever written.”1 This nonexistent book is filled with thrilling accounts of the rediscovery of the riches of the gospel and of believers’ reawakening to the fullness of what belongs to them in Christ after desperate years of trying to eke out a Christian existence in self-imposed scarcity of spiritual resources. And the surprise ending of this best-seller is that their gospel was too small precisely because their God was too small. Thinking inadequate thoughts about the holiness and love of God, they could not help having inadequate conceptions of the salvation he has provided. The gospel so outstrips our created measurements that it can be measured only against something as immense as God himself. Since the only thing as immense as God himself is God himself, we must look to him to get our bearings on the magnitude of the gospel.
There is one place in Scripture where this sheer greatness of the gospel is most profusely described: the blessing with which Paul opens the epistle to the Ephesians. Paul begins by praising God for the gift of the gospel: “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places,” and then he takes a deep breath and starts counting out those blessings, one after another, in a 202-word avalanche of praise without pause or punctuation in verses 3 through14.2 Paul speaks here from the fullness of his heart as well as the keenness of his insight. The theme of “blessing” overwhelms him and pushes him to compose a correspondingly overwhelming sentence. It runs from heaven to earth, taking sudden turns and detours as it doubles and triples back on itself, oscillating between God and man and circling its subject to view it from every angle. For all this wildness, the blessing has also a stateliness and coherence which reflects the wisdom which it praises. No translation or paraphrase can capture it all definitively, but here is one of the possibilities:
God chose us in Christ
before the ground of the world was laid
to be holy and blameless before him;
In his love he determined us in advance
for adoption into sonship through Jesus Christ
through the good pleasure of his will
to the praise of his glorious grace—
Grace which God graced us with in the Beloved
through whose blood we have redemption,
the forgiveness of sins,
according to the riches of his grace
which he poured out on us in abundance;
In all wisdom and insight
he made us know the mystery of his will
according to his own counsel,
which he had settled beforehand in Christ:
through an economy in which, when the times were fulfilled,
he would sum up everything, things in heaven and things on earth,
under one heading: Christ!
In him we too have been given an inheritance
as we were predestined according to the purpose
of the one who works out everything
in accord with the counsel of his will
So that we would be a praise of his glory;
We who were the first to hope in Christ, who you also,
—you who have heard the word of truth,
the gospel of your salvation—
when you believed, you were sealed in Christ
with the promised Holy Spirit,
who is the down payment on what we will inherit
when God redeems his own possession
to the praise of his glory.
Every line, and nearly every word, of the great blessing could profitably be unpacked at length. However, in order to clarify the way it shows the size and shape of the gospel, we can stay out of the details and notice instead only two things about the passage as a whole: first, that it is unmanageably large and complex, and second, that it has a decidedly Trinitarian contour.3 The blessing of the gospel, in other words, is big and God-shaped.
First let us attend to its size and complexity, leaving its shape until the next chapter. In this translation I intentionally divided the blessing into three sections to highlight its Trinitarian logic, from the electing and adopting Father, through the redeeming and revealing Son, to the promised and sealing Spirit. But if the sentence is, as some commentators have said, “a monster,” I hope I have done nothing to domesticate it.4 The wildness of the blessing is an important aspect of it, and the reader who does not feel some degree of vertigo from its outrageous breadth of thought is not reading it properly. It contains more ideas, pointing in more directions, than anyone could reasonably be expected to take in. On the basis of Ephesians 1:3–14, nobody can accuse Paul of having a gospel that is too small. There is an abundance here bordering on excessiveness. And Paul’s sentence has that character precisely because, as Scripture breathed out by God, it faithfully corresponds to the character of the reality it points us to: a gospel of salvation that is the work of the untamable holy Trinity. Like all Scripture, this passage is the word of God and has within itself the life, activity, and incisiveness we would expect in an almighty speech-act through which God does his work (Heb. 4:12). It is an effective word, and one of its effects here is to snatch its listeners out of their own lives and drop them into Christ. It immediately takes the reader to the heavenlies, to the world of the Spirit, and from that vantage point invites us to join in blessing God for the blessing he blessed us with.
The reason Paul starts the letter with such a disorienting blast is that he is summoning us to praise God, and in order to praise God rightly the thing we need most is a good dose of disorientation. All of us think from our own point of view, starting from a center in ourselves and how things look to us. This is unavoidable, since everyone has to start from where they are. It is simply how finite minds work and is not even related to the kind of self-centeredness that is sinful. However, when finite minds come to encounter the infinite God, we run the risk of adding God to the catalog of items we are interested in studying, or acquiring, or reaping some benefits from. Especially when the issue is the blessing of salvation, the danger is great that the finite mind will treat God and his blessings as enhancements to be added to our lives. The only way to escape this tendency is to be drawn out of ourselves into the bewilderingly large and complex gospel of God. The excessiveness of Paul’s sentence seeks to disorient our existing categories in order to reorient us by drawing us in to the divine orientation. What we need is the miracle of being able to see our own situation from an infinitely higher point of view. We need to start our thinking from a center in God, not in ourselves. If it is not too much of a pun, Paul invites us to an ecstatic gospel: the good news of standing outside (ek-stasis) of ourselves.
Paul doesn’t expect to pound his readers rhetorically into adopting the right point of view. He may have composed a stunning sentence to start his letter, but he knows that nobody has the resources for that cognitive leap to thinking from a center in God. No writer can express that point of view effectively, and no reader can learn it directly. A miracle has to happen.5 That is why Paul’s argumentation and description are linked with invocation throughout the letter. Immediately after the blessing he prays for a divine gift of spiritual revelation and illumination:
[I pray] . . . that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of him, having the eyes of your heart enlightened, that you may know . . . (Eph. 1:17–18)6
And in the third chapter Paul prays for his readers to comprehend all the dimensions of this truth, and to “know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge” (v. 19). Fully aware that he is asking for what is humanly impossible, Paul plays “knowing” and “unknowable” off of each other oxymoronically. He is not being absurd; rather he “makes a seemingly absurd combination of opposites in order to emphasize a particular point.”7 To underline our need for this direct revelation even more, Paul urges his readers to give glory to God, who “is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think” (v. 20), or, in an overly literal translation as awkward as the original Greek, “who is super-abundantly able beyond everything we can ask or think.”
The strategy of Ephesians is to give us a bird’s-eye view of the gospel, which is only available from a vantage point far above all created powers. When by the grace of God that miracle of reorientation happens, we are not just ready to read Ephesians, but we are already taken in to the spiritual blessing of God in Christ. After all, the only “standing outside of ourselves” that really results in salvation is standing “in Christ,” a phrase which Paul hammers home at least once in each verse of the sentence.8
Because of the singular power with which Ephesians focuses on this message, the epistle has always had its special devotees throughout church history. The greatest of all theological commentators on Ephesians is the Puritan Thomas Goodwin (1600–1679), whose massive commentary on the book is at once a detailed verse-by-verse exposition and a masterful synthesis of all that is best in the Puritan Reformed vision. In the first few verses, Goodwin spots the character of God’s blessing as being ultimately coterminous with God himself. Before expounding the great blessing of Ephesians 1:3–14 word by word, Goodwin establishes the larger picture: “Not only God doth bless with all other good things, but above all by communicating himself and his own blessedness unto them.”9 The blessing of the gospel is essentially God declaring, “‘Thou shalt have all my blessedness to make thee blessed,’ which the Apostle fitly renders, Eph. 3, ‘being filled with all the fulness of God;’ and indeed all things else without God or besides God could never make us blessed.”10
HAVE EVANGELICALS BELIEVED THIS?
What we have been calling, metaphorically, the “size of the gospel” surveyed in Ephesians is something with which the evangelical tradition is quite familiar. I am not trying to be shocking or innovative when I say the gospel is God-sized; I am only reiterating what evangelicalism has long known and confessed. I call here a handful of evangelical witnesses to testify to the fact. These voices do not prove that the gospel is as comprehensive as I assert; they only demonstrate that evangelicals have a heritage of saying so.
It was, for example, a constant theme of A. B. Simpson (1843–1919), founder of the Christian and Missionary Alliance. His classic book A Larger Christian Life shows this preoccupation with abundance and excess in its title and in most of its chapter titles: “More than Conquerors,” “Grace Abounding,” “From Strength to Strength,” “God’s Measureless Measures,” “Spiritual Growth, Enlarged Work.” Speaking specifically about the way Ephesians articulates the message, he says,
If we would rise to the full measure of God’s standard for us, let us realize the magnitude of God as well as of our own being, for it is with nothing less than Himself that He means to fill us. Let us take in the full dimensions of His resources of grace, their length, their breadth, their depth, their height; and then let us measure, if we can, the magnitude of God who is the living substance and personal source of all this grace, and we shall have some approximation at least to what the apostle means when he exclaims, “Now unto Him that is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that worketh in us, unto Him be glory in the church by Christ Jesus, throughout all ages, world without end. Amen.”11
So fluent was Simpson in the rhetoric of gospel abundance that he wrote hymns saturated in the theme:
The mercy of God is an ocean divine,
A boundless and fathomless flood.
Launch out in the deep, cut away the shore line,
And be lost in the fullness of God.12
Admittedly, “lost in the fullness of God” may sound a bit overly mystical, and language like that may bring to mind the anti-mystical remark, “I’d rather be found in Christ than lost in God.”13 If we are going to discuss subjects like the fullness of the gospel, however, we will have to come to terms with the mystic. There are some subjects that impel us to use such language, whether we are temperamentally prone to it or not. Adolph Saphir (1831–1891) thought it wise to open his greatest book on the Christian life with the sentence, “Not every mystic is a Christian, but every Christian is a mystic.”14 When Paul reflects on his work as a preacher of the gospel to Gentile and Jew without distinction, he describes himself as “a steward of the mysteries of God.” We will devote more space to this in the final chapter.
Without running right up to the brink of the mystical, however, we can see that evangelical history is full of reforms, revivals, and awakenings that left believers astonished with the sudden reappearance of the sheer scope and reach of the gospel. Every time a group names itself “the full gospel” something or another, it implies that somebody somewhere was living with only a partial gospel. What they are saying, in their own idiom, is that they have discovered that the gospel is a great thing, and that it includes whole regions of insight and experience that beg to be explored. R. A. Torrey (1856–1928) reports that he was counseling with a man whose life as a Christian was so dominated by sin that he was forced to question whether he was saved. Listening to the man’s testimony, Torrey mused, “That sounds like an evangelical conversion.” But as he pressed for further insight, Torrey suddenly grasped the problem and told the man: “You only believed half of the Gospel, that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and was buried. Will you now believe the other half of the Gospel? Will you believe that He rose again?” The man heartily agreed, and Torrey summarized the fullness of truth he had been led into:
Christ not only died, but He rose again, and is a living Saviour tonight. He has all power in Heaven and on earth, and the devil is no match for Him; the risen Christ has power to snap the fetters of strong drink, to snap the fetters of opium, to snap the fetters of lust, and of every sin; and if you will trust Him to do it for you, He will do it.15
The catalog of sins (“strong drink . . . opium”) is Victorian, but the instinct is perennial: evangelicals are constantly daring themselves, each other, and the world to embrace the entire gospel rather than a fragment of it. They have a vision of the scale and scope of salvation, because they understand that salvation must be measured against the competence and capacity of the one doing the saving.
The Savior, as we are told in Hebrews 7:25, is “able to save to the uttermost them that come unto God by him.” I quote this in the King James Version because (like the title of this chapter) it was that particular combination of words which stuck in the minds of English-speaking evangelicals and became a motto for embracing the full scope of the gospel. Two of evangelicalism’s greatest preachers, John Wesley (1703–1791) and C. H. Spurgeon (1834–1892), were drawn to these words repeatedly. Wesley cited them often, and in his Notes on the New Testament explained the “uttermost” of Hebrews 7:25 as “all the guilt, power, root, and consequence of sin.”16 Wesley preached a version of full salvation that struck many as outrageously optimistic about how far salvation could go in personal transformation. Defending the message of the early Methodists, Wesley wrote that “what most surprised us, was, that we were said to ‘dishonour Christ,’ by asserting that he ‘saveth to the uttermost;’ by maintaining he will reign in our hearts alone, and subdue all things to himself.”17
Spurgeon too was warm to the words “saved to the uttermost” and asked his audiences, “How far can salvation go? What are its limits and its boundaries? Christ is a Saviour: how far is he able to save?”18 For Spurgeon, the outrageous scope of this salvation extended to the eternal security and perseverance of the saved: “Wherever I go, I hope always to bear my hearty protest against the most accursed doctrine of a saint’s falling away and perishing.” Spurgeon saw the character of the gospel as total, final, and comprehensive, and articulated it especially in terms of its permanence.
Never mind that each of these preachers tended to elaborate on the same text by appealing to their own characteristic theological emphases. Spurgeon, who drew power from his Calvinist convictions, preached “the uttermost” as an unshakeable assurance of salvation grounded in the perseverance of the saints. Wesley, with a vision of perfect holiness, pictured “the uttermost” as entire sanctification. It would be all too easy to dwell on their differences (which I have not attempted to conceal), and it would conveniently allow us to evade the challenge which, with one united voice, they present to any age that diminishes the gospel. The fact that Spurgeon had a Calvinist uttermost and Wesley had a holiness uttermost is insignificant compared to the more basic fact that both of them had big thoughts about the gospel and pushed hard to communicate them. They perceived the scope of salvation and struggled to frame thoughts big enough to accommodate it. Neither of them could be reproached with “your gospel is too small.”
A gospel which is only about the moment of conversion but does not extend to every moment of life in Christ is too small. A gospel that gets your sins forgiven but offers no power for transformation is too small. A gospel that isolates one of the benefits of union with Christ and ignores all the others is too small. A gospel that must be measured by your own moral conduct, social conscience, or religious experience is too small. A gospel that rearranges the components of your life but does not put you personally in the presence of God is too small.
DECADENTLY NEGLECTING SO GREAT SALVATION
Early in the book of Hebrews, the author asks an alarming question: “How shall we escape, if we neglect so great salvation?” (Heb. 2:3 kjv). The old covenant was glorious: administered by angels, shining with glory, bringing knowledge of the true God. But the new covenant, the gospel, is incomprehensibly greater. It was not spoken through angels (v. 2), but spoken by God the Father through the Lord Jesus himself in person (v. 3, echoing 1:1, where God has spoken in his Son), and authenticated by the Holy Spirit (v. 4). “Neglecting” it means undervaluing it or failing to acknowledge how great it is. What is this “great salvation” we should pay heed to? How great is it? As Spurgeon asked, “How far does salvation go?”
A besetting problem in recent evangelicalism, in contrast to the older evangelical tradition, is the tendency we have been describing of treating salvation as less than it is. Some people think of salvation as nothing but forgiveness, perhaps a do-over or a clean slate to try not messing up again. Others have bigger ideas about forgiveness, thinking of salvation as forgiveness-in-advance for all future sins. If that’s all salvation is, it could easily lead to antinomianism. In reaction to this, some people view salvation as an opportunity for moral reform: you can tell who is a Christian by seeing who is moral, or at least who is making moral progress. It is possible to pick and choose from the elements of the faith, to produce your own lethal mixture of the elements.
There are Christians whose three cardinal doctrines are (1) once saved always saved; (2) perfection on earth is impossible; (3) my future sins are already forgiven. These are less of a doctrinal system and more of a plan for excusing carnality. This kind of Christianity is matched by its evil opposite, which holds three truths to be scripturally evident above all else: (1) faith without works is dead; (2) nobody goes to heaven without true holiness; (3) we have free will. These are less of a doctrinal system and more of a declaration of intent to pursue righteousness by works. Any of these propositions might underwrite a healthy life of faith if placed in their proper contexts. But taken by themselves, or combined with other emphases that reinforce their dangers without balancing them out, they are disastrous.
For some evangelicals, salvation is an experience of conversion, a moment of religious encounter in which you decide to believe the gospel, to accept Jesus, and to identify yourself from now on as Christian. For others, salvation is a better attitude made possible by God’s changing his mind about you: he used to scowl, but now he smiles. Some people think of it as missing hell and hitting heaven.
There are “gospels of sin management,”19 gospels of prosperity,20 and gospels of self-esteem. In these last three examples, the “gospels” on offer are obviously not good news at all but very bad news indeed: not evangel, but dysangel. J. C. Ryle (1816–1900) noted that the gospel is “a most curiously and delicately compounded medicine, and a medicine that is very easily spoiled.” It can be spoiled, he said, by substitution, addition, interposition, or disproportion.21 That’s why Paul warned the Galatians that “another gospel” is not really a gospel at all, and its preachers are not evangelists but anathema.
But the earlier examples sound at least partly right: doesn’t salvation include forgiveness, assurance, an experience of conversion, straightening out your life, and heaven when you die? Certainly it does. But it is not reducible to any of these things, and it can’t be cobbled together just by making a long enough list of elements like these, even if they are biblically warranted elements. Underneath all these is the thing itself, the gospel. The gospel is the underlying reality that gives rise to all these benefits. The salvation that we are in danger of undervaluing is in itself a great thing, which radiates blessings and benefits in every direction, at all levels. “Don’t neglect so great salvation” implies both a gift and a task: to have experienced salvation is to have received an incomparably great gift, but to esteem it as it deserves is a dauntingly great task. God put his own Spirit into us not only to give us something but to make us understand what it is that we’ve been given: “Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we might understand the things freely given us by God” (1 Cor. 2:12).
Every one who is saved is by definition in possession of this great thing. But think how poorly some Christians articulate what they have. Faced with this enormous blessing in its staggering scope and its manifold complexity, we do what we can to get it under control. We’ve learned a useful label that we can use to signify it for purposes of communication: we say we’re saved. If we have to explain what saved means, we add the next most comfortable term: “born again.” Pushed past that, we may supply words like “forgiven,” or “redeemed” (though that sounds a bit fancy), or specify that we are Christians, or go on to explain that we have a personal relationship with Jesus, or have accepted him into our hearts. Any of these, or all of them together, may get the job of communication done. They work especially well if we’re talking to somebody who shares the experience and only needs to be shown a flash card in order to identify the thing itself. But taken by themselves, these words we use can come to seem abstract. I often encounter believers who wonder why the language “personal relationship with Jesus” isn’t in the Bible, and if they should quit using it, and what it means.
In these cases, our problem is not so much that we’ve distorted the gospel by adding to it or taking away from it. The problem is that we have taken one true element of it and characterized the whole by that part. Our situation is like the legend of the six blind men who encountered the elephant: one leaned against its side and said “elephants are like walls.” Another felt its leg and said “elephants are like trees” and so on until each of them had described the elephant as like a snake (the trunk), a spear (the tusk), a fan (the ear), and a rope (the tail). Each of them had grasped something real, but because of their blindness none of them could produce overall descriptions that did justice to the reality. Even combining the six descriptions would not solve the problem, because no matter how you arrange a wall, a tree, a snake, a spear, a fan, and a rope, you will not assemble anything worthy of the name “elephant.”
All cultures and subcultures move through stages, and evangelicalism is, among other things, a distinct subculture of Christianity. In cultural terms, a classical period is a time when all the parts of a community’s life seem to hang together, mutually reinforce each other, and make intuitive sense. By contrast, a decadent period is marked by dissolution of all the most important unities, a sense that whatever initial force gave impetus and meaningful form to the culture has pretty much spent its power. Decadence is a falling off, a falling apart from a previous unity.
Inhabitants of a decadent culture feel themselves to be living among the scraps and fragments of something that must have made sense to a previous generation but which now seem more like a pile of unrelated items. Decadent cultures feel unable to articulate the reasons for connecting things to each other. They spend a lot of time staring at isolated fragments, unable to combine them into meaningful wholes. They start all their important speeches by quoting Yeats’s overused line, “Things fall apart, the center cannot hold. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.” Decadents either fetishize their tribal and party distinctions or mix absolutely everything together in one sloppy combination. Not everybody in a decadent culture even feels a need to work toward articulating unities, but those who do make the attempt face a baffling challenge. At best, the experience is somewhat like working a jigsaw puzzle without the guidance of the finished image from the box top; at worst, it is like undertaking that task while fighting back the slow horror of realization that what you have in front of you are pieces that come from several different puzzles, none of them complete or related. Evangelicalism in our lifetime seems to be in a decadent period. In some sectors of the evangelical subculture, there is not even a living cultural memory of a classical period or golden age; what we experience is decadence all the way back.
Under conditions of decadence, two types of reaction typically occur. Conservative temperaments tend to grab up all the fragments and insist on keeping them as they were found. They may be totally inert lumps that nobody knows how to make use of, but the conservative will faithfully preserve them as museum pieces. Liberal temperaments, on the other hand, tend to toss the fragments aside as rapidly as they stop proving useful. Imagine a conservative and a liberal in some future dark age, pondering an antique internal combustion engine that either can operate but neither could build. Bolted to the side of the engine is an inscrutable gadget that is not clearly adding anything to the function of the vehicle. The liberal would reason that since it cannot be shown to do anything for the motor’s function, it should be removed and discarded. The conservative would reason that since it cannot be shown to do anything, it must remain precisely where it is forever. Perhaps if we knew what it did, it could be removed, but as long as we do not understand it, it stays. Whatever the merits of their temperaments (and neither can be right in this case), under the condition of decadence liberals become streamliners and conservatives become pack rats. Evangelicals have long tended toward the pack rat temperament, even though there are some signs that we may currently be exchanging that temperament for its relatively less happy alternative. What it leaves us with is an impressive stock of soteriological bric-a-brac that we don’t know what to do with or how it originally went together.
The inability to grasp the wholeness of salvation is actually one of the primary manifestations of our decadent theological culture. Is Christian salvation forgiveness, a personal relationship with Jesus, power for moral transformation, or going to heaven? It is all of those and more, but a true account of the thing itself will have to start with the living whole if we ever hope to make sense of the parts. Just think how tricky it is to combine free forgiveness and moral transformation in an organic way if what you are starting with is the individual parts. A dreary back-and-forth between cheap grace and works-righteousness is one of the bedeviling distractions of evangelical experience under the conditions of decadence.
Taking up the materials at hand, is it possible to assemble a coherent doctrine of salvation that takes all the particulars into account? An instructive exercise is to take the main ways that evangelical Christians articulate salvation, and try to order them logically. Are we born again because we are forgiven, or forgiven because we are born again? Does “saved” refer to deliverance from condemnation now, or to deliverance from hell later? Does Jesus live in your heart because God has chosen to consider you as if you were righteous, or does God look at you and see righteousness because he sees Jesus in your heart? Most of us can make some progress on these questions and start assembling a logical ordo salutis, a structured (though not necessarily chronological) order of salvation. But when you start with the parts, it is hard to escape the sense that there is too much guesswork involved in combining them into a whole. The solution is to start from the whole and then descend to the parts. But where is the whole to be found? And how do we get to wholeness if we are forced to start from our current situation among the fragments?
THERE MUST BE MORE
A first step along the route from disintegration to integration is to clarify the false hopes that currently suggest themselves to us as the true core of Christian life. If we have learned from Ephesians, and from the older evangelical tradition, to think large thoughts about salvation, then we may already be in a position to keep ourselves from falling into certain traps. When Christians undertake to describe the central reality of their existence as Christians, what possibilities typically come to mind? The three most serious candidates are perennially the same: doctrine, behavior, and emotions.
Henry Scougal (1650–1678), a Scottish theologian who lived only to the age of twenty-seven, wrote a classic book that addressed this subject directly. His book, The Life of God in the Soul of Man,22 is not widely read anymore, but it has exerted a tremendous formative influence on the evangelical tradition, especially through its impact on the leaders of the eighteenth-century awakenings. Susannah Wesley (1669– 1742) seems to have loved the book and recommended it to her sons John and Charles. Charles (1703–1788) in turn gave a copy to George Whitefield (1714–1770), who later testified that he “never knew what true religion was” until he read Scougal. In saying this, Whitefield was testifying to the book’s role in his conversion and also putting his finger on the main thing Scougal sets out to address: the nature of true religion. “Religion” in our era is often a pejorative term, even among evangelicals who are so obviously religious. The term is used to indicate a formal or artificial mode of behaving and is usually put in contrast to something with more reality or immediacy. There are two groups who are especially likely to start their self-descriptions with “I’m not religious:” evangelical Christians and self-consciously secular people. The evangelical will finish the sentence (or T-shirt or bumper sticker) with “. . . I just love the Lord,” while the secular person will finish with the now ubiquitous canard, “. . . but I’m very spiritual.”
If a modern paraphrase of Henry Scougal’s book were put on the market, the best translation of “true religion” for our ears would probably be “authentic spirituality.” But let us at least attempt to hear him in his own voice first: “I cannot speak of religion, but I must lament that, among so many pretenders to it, so few understand what it means.” He then anatomizes the three most common mis-locations of true religion:
Some [place] it in the understanding, in orthodox notions and opinions; and all the account they can give of their religion is, that they are of this or the other persuasion,and have joined themselves to one of those many sects whereinto Christendom is most unhappily divided.
These are the “head” Christians, who not only take care to have correct doctrine—which we should all do—but who mistakenly believe that being “theologically correct” is the sum and substance of the Christian life. As Scougal points out, they also tend to be unduly divisive, though of course they insist that it’s all in defense of truth. Their problem is not that they care about being orthodox but that they care about nothing else, to the point for all their wisdom they can’t quite conceive of what it is you think might be missing from their lives. Of the three kinds of inadequate Christians Scougal indicts, I consider these “orthodox notions” believers to be nearest to the real thing, but for that reason they are probably the most thoroughly trapped. If you tell one of these top-heavy believers that they are missing out on the reality of salvation, they will immediately make room in their intellectual system for a doctrine about “the reality of salvation.” They earnestly seek to embrace all God’s truth, but if you tell them they are missing the power of godliness, they will buy (or write) a book about it, do a Bible study about it, or in some other way try to put together a proper doctrine about it.
Others place it in the outward man, in a constant course of external duties,and a model of performances:if they live peacably with their neighbors, keep a temperate diet, observe the returns of worship, frequenting the church and their closet, and sometimes extend their hands to the relief of the poor, they think they have sufficiently acquitted themselves.
This “outward man” religion practiced by the “hand” Christians is the moralistic reduction Christianity. At its worst, this mind-set can be a practical atheism that treats Christianity as a useful mythology to underwrite a decent life. It’s hard to shake the feeling that these believers are just naturally good people and that if they were adherents of any of the world’s religions, they would be just as generous, peaceful, devout, and prudent in their conduct. You want these people for neighbors and you don’t care what they believe, because the proof is in their good behavior. At its best, this version of true religion is in harmony with the demands of God’s law, animated by a holy zeal, and especially sensitive to social justice and the physical needs of the poor. Again, there is nothing wrong with this mentality except that it leaves out the main thing. The problem is not that they pursue good works—which we should all do—but that they see these manifestations as the essence of Christianity.
Others again put all religion in the affections, in rapturous heats and ecstatic devotion; and all they aim at, is, to pray with passion, and think of heaven with pleasure, and to be affected with those kind and melting expressions wherewith they court their Saviour, till they persuade themselves that they are mightily in love with him; and from thence assume a great confidence of their salvation, which they esteem the chief of Christian graces.23
Of the three types that Scougal describes, these “heart” Christians are the most easily recognizable. In fact, they have apparently not changed very much since the seventeenth century, and Scougal’s language probably calls to mind contemporary examples: “rapturous heats and ecstatic devotions,” “kind and melting expressions,” “mightily in love.” Heart Christianity is so good and so powerful that it is a constant temptation to the head and hand Christians. If you can once awaken the other believers out of their intellectual and moral reductionism, they are very likely to run straight to heart Christianity and spend the rest of their lives testifying to how they once were cold but now are hot and how they have been delivered from abstraction and brought into contact with reality. But they have only transferred their allegiance from one reductionism to another.
An American author writing in 1947 similarly started a book with the Scougalesque24 task “to disabuse certain minds of the erroneous idea that is so widespread, that the Christian Life consists in accepting certain articles of belief and conforming to a certain code of conduct.”25 This is a warning that must be sounded repeatedly because the temptation is constant. The problem of heart Christianity is not that it cultivates and rejoices in a warm emotional apprehension of God in Christ—which we should all do—but that it confuses this for salvation and true Christian experience.
Head, hand, and heart Christianity each testifies to an element of the truth, but none of them is the thing itself. You cannot come into contact with the nature of salvation, or see the gospel in its full scope and magnitude, by staying in any of these three reductionisms. You may be able to expand and enrich your Christian experience by learning to move from one to another in turn. Emotional Christians, for instance, can and should profit from attending to doctrine; and, conversely, it is a wonderful thing to behold a coldly rational Christian suddenly discover the existence of an affective domain previously unimagined. But looking for true religion under these three headings is a shell game, because the thing itself is not under any of them. Nor is it to be found in the transcendent unity of the three, by simply drawing a bigger circle around them. After all, these three factors are all elements in what we would traditionally call the soul:
It may be clearer that we are talking about the human soul if we refer to the domains with the longer Latinate terms intellect, volition, and emotion. But whatever language we choose for these human faculties that give rise to our doctrine, behavior, and emotions, the point is that what is under discussion is a set of phenomena immanent to human nature. When we behave, we behave from head, hand, or heart.
These things, Scougal says, each have a “resemblance of piety” but “at the best are but means of obtaining it, or particular exercises of it,” and they are “frequently mistaken for the whole of religion,” but they are not.
Certainly religion is quite another thing; and they who are acquainted with it,will entertain far different thoughts,and disdain all those shadows and false imitations of it. They know by experience, that true religion is an union of the soul with God, a real participation of the divine nature, the very image of God drawn upon the soul; or, in the Apostle’s phrase, it is Christ formed within us.
Beyond the notional, social, and emotional-devotional reductions of the gospel, Scougal points to “union of the soul with God” and then mobilizes scriptural and traditional language about partaking of the divine nature, being conformed to the image of God, and having Christ formed within us. Finally, he sums up his message with the line that gave his book its title and forms the outline of the rest of the book: “Briefly, I know not how the nature of religion can be more fully expressed, than by calling it a divine life.” Christianity is nothing less than the life of God in the soul of man.
Here Scougal breaks through to the fact that the gospel can be accounted for only by reference to something above and beyond the immanent realities of head, hand, and heart. True religion is a divine life, and by definition divine life is something found in the living God. Our salvation and our existence as Christians come from and consist in the union of that divine life with what we are in ourselves. Salvation comes from it: this is the point of contact that brings about salvation. Christian existence consists in it: this is the state in which we have our ongoing being. True religion, says Scougal, consists in the life of God in the soul of man.
Scougal helps put the various manifestations (the “particular exercises” of piety, in his language) into their proper places and distinguishes them from the source and essence that alone can give rise to them. That source is the living God. With this analysis we have come back to the original thesis of the present chapter, that when we ask about the magnitude of the gospel, the only appropriate thing to measure it against is God. The gospel is God-sized, because God puts himself into it. The living God binds himself to us and becomes our salvation, the life of God in the soul of man. We are saved by the gospel of God to worship the God of the gospel.
GRACE AS GOD’S SELF-GIVING
Salvation, according to the Christian idea, is a thing given to us by grace. But just as we have traced a variety of reductions and constrictions in soteriology, so there are reductions and constrictions of grace itself. Briefly, there are two concepts of grace currently on the market, which are each inadequate and which are impossible to reconcile with each other. On the one hand, grace is often considered “God being nice to us,” especially in not holding sins against us. Alternatively, grace is thought of as God-given power, power that enables us to transform our lives. Stated this baldly, they are debased versions of Protestant and Roman Catholic teaching, respectively. It might be possible to start from one of these points of departure, stating them more fairly, and building out from them to establish a more comprehensive teaching on grace. If we were trying to do justice to these two poles of the fight over grace, we could engage great minds like Luther and Aquinas, respectively, to feel the force of their presentation. But a cartoonish caricature, for all its grotesqueness, does capture enough of a resemblance to make a point. I am intentionally stating them in drastically abbreviated form in order to emphasize their real limitations. On the popular level, we often operate with such truncated ideas about grace: on the one hand, God winking at sin, on the other hand God boosting us into holiness. Neither of these is adequate to the biblical reality of God’s grace. Neither the wink nor the boost is amazing.
But grace, as evangelicals well know and have taught the world to sing, is amazing. When John Newton put the adjective “Amazing” in front of the noun “Grace,” he hit on a sound so sweet that we now recognize “amazing” as part of the definition of grace. Anyone who teaches a grace that is not amazing is teaching something that is not grace. We must cast the net wider in order to take in enough of the full biblical witness to grace. The Methodist theologian Thomas Oden, attempting to summarize the doctrine of grace from the first several centuries of the church, tried to put it all into a few sentences:
Grace is an overarching term for all of God’s gifts to humanity, all the blessings of salvation, all events through which are manifested God’s own self-giving. Grace is a divine attribute revealing the heart of the one God, the premise of all spiritual blessing.26
Oden’s account still doesn’t manage to say everything, but he at least attempts to be broad enough to take in the various dimensions required in a description of grace. It reaches out widely to the far ends of the history of salvation and extends up into the being of God himself as “a divine attribute revealing the heart of the one God.” His description surely reaches the heights here but does not descend to the depths of sin.27 And it should be no surprise that as he reaches out to “the height, the breadth, the length and depth” of this grace, Oden is driven to speak the language of Ephesians, echoing Ephesians 1:3 in calling grace “the premise of all spiritual blessing.”
Furthermore, by describing grace as “God’s own self-giving,” Oden makes contact with the hidden center of the great blessing of Ephesians 1:3–14, the fact that God gives us “every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places” by giving us first and foremost himself. We have already seen Thomas Goodwin expound Ephesians in these terms: “Not only God doth bless with all other good things, but above all by communicating himself and his own blessedness unto them . . .”28 The thousand pages Goodwin wrote on Ephesians are crammed with further extrapolations of the same insight, that God blesses by putting himself forward in person as the blessing. Goodwin was especially concerned to underline the way this self-giving reveals the depth of God’s love and concern for us:
And surely if God communicates himself to whom he blesseth, his blessing of them must proceed from the deepest good-will; and indeed is the reason why he giveth himself, as in marriage they bestow themselves and all, to whom they bear their special good-will.29
God’s self-giving for human salvation is a motif that pervades not just Ephesians but the whole Bible and is particularly prominent in parts of the Old Testament. Goodwin refers to God’s pledge to Abraham, “I am thy shield, and thy exceeding great reward” (Gen. 15:1 kjv).30 God does not promise to give Abraham a reward but personally to be his reward, which certainly illuminates why the reward is “exceeding great.” The song Israel sings when delivered from Egypt praises God that “the Lord is my strength and my song, and has become my salvation” (Ex. 15:2), similarly eschewing weaker formulations like “he has made my salvation” or “he has carried out my salvation” in favor of a formulation that puts God himself forward as salvation.
This characteristic Old Testament language saturates the Psalms, of course, which praise God as “my rock and my fortress and my deliverer, my God, my rock, in whom I take refuge, my shield, and the horn of my salvation, my stronghold” (Ps. 18:2). The messianic intensification of the theme is present on every page of the New Testament, being, as it is, the core of what is New in the New Testament. This new-covenant intensification is especially striking in the Gospel of John, where Jesus in the famous series of “I am” statements puts himself forward as being, in person, the vine, the bread of life, the way, and the truth. There is much more to be said about this, but since almost none of it can be said without an explicitly Trinitarian vocabulary, it must wait for the next chapter.
The good news that Jesus brings is that God has chosen to accomplish our salvation by being himself for us, by opening up his own life and bringing us into fellowship. It is worth underlining that God has chosen to accomplish our salvation this way, that he has freely and graciously elected this particular option as the way he wants to exercise mercy. For all we know (and we should admit that it isn’t much), human salvation could have been secured with considerably less cost and effort. God has all power and infinite creativity at his disposal, and no obstacle can stand before him. If we were bound by chains, he could break them. If we owed a debt, he could remit it by issuing a proclamation. If our lineage was infected, he could annihilate the substance of which we are made and speak us back into existence uninfected. If the Devil had bought us, God could have opened the storehouse of heaven and bought us back with whatever currency is fungible in the heavenlies, at whatever the going exchange rate is. If an enemy oppressed us, the Lord is a warrior whom no foe can stand against.
For all we know, God could have done a lot less than he did, but it is worse than silly to speculate about roads not taken by the Almighty. The one thing we know is that what God in fact chose to do was to give himself to us personally to be our salvation. Apparently that self-giving is what counts for God as the kind of salvation he wants to extend to fallen humanity. There may be deep reasons for that, reasons that extend back into God’s purposes for creation irrespective of sin and the fall. Perhaps the soteriology of divine self-giving gives us a glimpse of what unfallen humanity is for in the first place. But that too is a road not taken, indeed the most epochal road ever not taken, but nevertheless one about which we can only speculate. Speculation of that sort can only take our eyes off the actual economy of salvation, which is clear and evident: God has given himself to us to be our salvation and has done so at great cost, with amazing grace, in a way that outstrips anything we could have asked, expected, or imagined.
THE GOSPEL AND THE DEEP THINGS
OF GOD
Here for certain we have a truth that evangelicalism has always grasped firmly. It is the central idea of that beloved text John 3:16 in which we can see the extent of the Father’s love for the world by attending to the greatness of the gift that he gave for our salvation: his Son. And it is at this point, where God’s self-giving is most conspicuous, that we are forced to break through to explicitly Trinitarian confession if we want to go any further. For in the case of God, himself is not a word that points to an isolated individual existing alone with his aloneness. When God finally fulfills all his promises by giving himself to be our salvation and our shield, this takes place as the Father gives the Son.
The index of how much God loves us is how much he gave to accomplish our salvation. Paul drives this point home as the climax of his far-ranging argument in Romans 8, grounding Christian hope and assurance in the fact that since God has already given his own Son, it obviously follows that nothing is too great for God to give. Dwight L. Moody, sometimes called “Mr. Evangelical,” preached frequently on this theme, and one of his last sermons was on the text of Romans 8:
Now Paul puts some questions. “Who can be against us? He that spared not His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all, how shall He not with Him also give us freely all things?” (verse 32). When God the Father gave Christ, the Son of His bosom, He literally gave up all that heaven had. He gave the richest jewel that heaven possessed. And if He has given us His Son, is there anything too great for us to ask? If a man should give me a diamond worth one hundred thousand dollars, I think I would make bold to ask him for a little piece of brown paper to carry it away in. If the Lord has given me the Son of His bosom, I can ask for anything. How shall He not freely give us all things?31
One of the typical ways evangelicals introduce the gospel is with the statement “Jesus loves you.” But when the time comes to take the full measure of that love, we have to look further than mere human sympathies. F. B. Meyer, preaching on John 15:9 (“As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you”), said:
Do you want to know how much Jesus loves you? Ah! soul, before thou canst master that arithmetic thou must learn another mode of computation.Tell me first the love of God the Father to His Son, and I will tell thee the love of the Son to thee.32
When we consider the gospel of salvation in Christ, we are not dealing with the outer fringes of God’s ways but with the very core and center of who God is. God is not trifling with us in the gospel but opening up in the most intimate way his very heart. Of course, God remains incomprehensible, mysterious, and far above all created things in a way that is not at all diminished by the way he makes himself lavishly available to fallen humanity in the economy of salvation. But his infinite transcendence over all created things cannot be construed as any kind of reserve or standoffishness. The Father’s giving of the Son renders that interpretation impossible. Having sent servants already, God takes the ultimate step and reaches out to his people by sending an agent more dear and intimate to himself: “What shall I do? I will send my beloved son; perhaps they will respect him” (Luke 20:13).
Thomas Goodwin brought all these insights together tersely when he said that “the things of the gospel are depths—the things of the gospel . . . are the deep things of God.”33 Goodwin loved to ponder the many ways in which the gospel was a mystery. He noted that this gospel was the thing into which prophets “inquired and searched diligently,” and that angels “desire to look into” its content (1 Pet. 1:10–12 kjv). But beyond this, Goodwin said, it was a mystery in the sense that God himself considered it uniquely precious, because it “lay (as I may so speak) at the bottom of his heart, the great secrets, which he esteemed such even from everlasting.”34 Goodwin was drawing language not from Ephesians but from 1 Corinthians when he spoke of “the deep things of God.”35 In the second chapter of this letter, Paul puts great emphasis on how profound, secret, and inaccessible to human understanding the blessings of the gospel are. What has been made known to us in the gospel is “what God has prepared for those who love him” (v. 9 niv) and far from being conformable to human wisdom, it is something that
no eye has seen,
nor ear heard,
nor the heart of man imagined,
words which most Christians probably associate with heaven but which Paul clearly intends with reference to the present revelation of the gospel. If this divine wisdom has now been handed over to us in the gospel, it is by miracle, because the origins of these things lie so deep within the heart of God that only God can know them. The mystery of the gospel is locked up inside of God and can be communicated only by someone who is God. Paul underlines this three different ways:
We impart a secret and hidden wisdom of God,which God decreed before the ages for our glory. (1 Cor. 2:7)
These things God has revealed to us through the Spirit. For the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God. For who knows a person’s thoughts except the spirit of that person, which is in him? So also no one comprehends the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. (1 Cor. 2:10–11)
“For who has understood the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him?” But we have the mind of Christ. (1 Cor. 2:16)
The predestining Father determined this mystery; and the depth-searching Spirit has access to these depths because he is as intimate with God as my spirit is with me. But that same Spirit has revealed them to us, and we therefore have come into harmony with the mind of Christ, the one who knows the mind of the Lord.36 For the present, let us ignore the implications of the threefoldness of the answer and simply note that the Spirit and Christ have brought out into the open a mystery that has its natural home at the center of God’s heart, at the depth of his life. This opened secret is the gospel. It has such a profound and divine character that even to make it known, God must give himself over for its revelation. That revelatory self-giving is perfectly in line with the content of the thing revealed, which is that God gives himself to us to be our salvation. He does not dispense blessings, but himself.
We have been led into pretty lofty thoughts by the material we are considering, but the soteriology of God’s self-giving is immediately relevant to our lives with God. There is an evangelical spirituality that corresponds to the deeply personal nature of God’s self-giving. It is a spirituality that focuses relentlessly on God himself and is on constant guard against the temptation to be distracted from God by his blessings, benefits, or gifts. A. B. Simpson’s gospel song, “Himself,” captures it perfectly:
Once it was the blessing, now it is the Lord;
Once it was the feeling, now it is His Word;
Once His gift I wanted, now the Giver own;
Once I sought for healing, now Himself alone.
Once ’twas painful trying, now ’tis perfect trust;
Once a half salvation, now the uttermost!
Once ’twas ceaseless holding, now He holds me fast;
Once ’twas constant drifting, now my anchor’s cast.37
Depending on our taste in poetry, Simpson’s lines may seem like overwrought emotion scanned out as pious doggerel. Depending on our individual tendencies in self-expression, the spirituality it expresses may seem histrionic and melodramatic. But this is the kind of language evangelicals have always used, and if they have often been able to say it with more decorum in a cultured and liturgical setting, they have also frequently said it so directly and emotionally that they made A. B. Simpson sound like a stuffy high-churchman by comparison. The modes of expression are many, but evangelical spirituality will always find a way to declare its adherence to God himself, emphasizing precisely the personal character of it. In view of the way God has thrown open his heart and turned his inner life inside out to be our salvation, how else could the people of the gospel respond? He speaks passionately to us, and we must answer.38
The gospel is that God is God for us, that he gives himself to be our salvation. In this sense, as John Piper has said in a series of meditations on God’s love as the gift of himself: “God is the gospel.”39 He does not give us some thing that makes us blessed, but he blesses us by giving us himself. It is a great thing to have said this much: to have thought such grand thoughts about salvation that we have come to view it as God-sized, and to confront the fact that God gives nothing less than himself to be our salvation. But it is not yet enough, because we have not yet said it specifically enough to bring out its actual contours. It is high time to move from the size of the gospel, to the shape of the gospel. We have already had to sidestep this theme repeatedly in the present chapter, at the cost of remaining somewhat abstract and general in places where specificity was called for. Certain pressing questions must now be faced: if God gives himself to us, how is it that he has himself to give? If evangelical existence is the life of God in the soul of man, what is this life with which the living God is alive and which he can put into the human soul without obliterating its humanity? When God puts himself forward to be our salvation in person, who is this person? This God who is the gospel is God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. To these three we now turn.