Do not be afraid . . . : to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord.
—Luke 2:10–11
Every night, my mother sat on the edge of my bed, held my hand, and said, “Let us pray.” Together we recited:
Now I lay me down to sleep,
I pray thee, Lord, my soul to keep;
If I should die before I wake,
I pray thee, Lord, my soul to take.
Evening after evening, with the dusk falling about us, it was the one prayer she taught me. It was not a prayer about blessing food or welcoming the day. No, in my family, the maternal theology lesson was about death. The words, intoned for generations, were handed down through the Puritans’ New England Primer to myriads of American children, even those raised by typically sunny Methodist mothers: a prayer of protection against death in the night and, if death should come, a prayer to go safely into the arms of Jesus.
In many ways, the outlook of the prayer was deeply countercultural. My mother’s other bible was Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care, that revolutionary manual of parental love, permissive child-rearing, and common sense, a book far more in tune with postwar optimism and advances in health care and longevity. It was hard to reconcile the nightly prayer with the Flintstones, in their weekly antics to leave the Stone Age behind, or the Jetsons, with their flying cars and robot maid, much less the advice of Dr. Spock.
I was born in the age of metallic Christmas trees, neon nightscapes, and Sputnik chandeliers. My parents were relentlessly modern, as they married young and were in their early twenties when I was born. They strove to be cool, even if saddled with a suburban mortgage and a couple of kids. They were always first among their friends with the latest gadgets in kitchen and living room, inviting guests to sit on sleek furniture and pouring martinis to those oohing and aahing over the sound of the latest records playing on the stereo console. It was a bit like growing up with a working-class version of Don Draper, sans the false identity and multiple affairs. Tradition was not their thing.
“Now I lay me down to sleep” were odd words in this world, a world that was chasing fears of death away. My parents seemed part of a generation molding a plastic future where nothing would ever grow old, decay, or die.
But impermanence snuck in. The nightly news broadcast how many Americans were killed in Vietnam. One of my mother’s cousins died of an overdose when I was six or seven, and people spoke of the episode in hushed tones. About the same time, a neighbor shot himself in order to avoid the draft. And then there were the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King and the riots that ensued. One edged close to us, and we could smell the fires and hear gunshots. My grandfather died from lung cancer. All the neon and plastic in the world could not cover up the fact that modernity veiled morbidity and death waited nearer than anyone wanted to admit.
Thus it came to be that one night when I was twelve, a few years after the evening prayer ritual with my mother had ceased, I woke up screaming. The idea of the Lord taking my soul in sleep resulted in terrors of the night.
My mother ran to my bed. “What’s the matter? What’s the matter?”
“I don’t want to die!” I could barely choke out the words. “I don’t want to die.”
“Well, I doubt that you are going to die tonight,” she replied. “What scares you?”
“I don’t know. Endless nothing,” I said. “I’ll be nothing, there will be nothing. Forever. Nothing. Emptiness.”
I might have missed my calling as a philosopher.
But my mother laughed. “Don’t be afraid,” she assured me. “You won’t know it when it happens. Now go back to sleep.”
I don’t think it occurred to her to pray.
At twelve, at the edge of adolescence, I was crying out for certainty. In the night, I felt the first fright of mortality, the longing for meaning. The friendly Jesus of earliest memory and the instructive teacher Jesus who helped me understand the commands seemed absent in the dark. I wanted to believe that whatever this life was that I had been given, the consciousness I experienced, was more than a brief sojourn through time. I wanted to believe that life meant something. I wanted to be remembered. I wanted to believe—anything. Not endless nothing. Anxiety surrounded me, forming nightmare clouds before sleep.
Even in bright daylight, I sometimes asked my mother, “Why are we here?”
She replied, “To help others.”
I followed up. “Why are they here?”
And her answer: “To help even more people, I suppose. You ask too many questions.”
So questions haunted the night and dogged the day. Whatever the case, when it came to this death and life business, this pondering of meaning and purpose, it became increasingly clear that I was on my own.
* * *
A neon sign hung outside a storefront church at the edge of our neighborhood. Two words formed a glowing red cross: JESUS SAVES.
“Savior” may well be the most ubiquitous term that Christians use to describe Jesus. This is especially true in Western Christianity, and Protestant churches in particular, where the emphasis on Jesus as the One who saves us from sin and death is a primary focus of both preaching and piety. Whether one prays before a crucifix, recites vows of baptism and Confirmation, goes forward for an altar call, or falls to the floor with ecstatic utterance, “Jesus saves” is understood as the central and continued meaning of his work for both individual Christians and the life of the world.
Yet, oddly enough, “Savior” appears only twice in the gospels to describe Jesus. One is at the beginning of the gospel of Luke, and the other is in John 4:42, where neighbors of a Samaritan woman proclaim, “This is truly the Savior of the world.” Other titles, like “teacher” and “rabbi,” appear far more frequently. Additional theological titles, like “Christ” (“anointed one”) and “Lord,” are also more prevalent than “Savior.” If, however, you ask random Christians who Jesus is, I am willing to bet the answer “Jesus is my Savior” would be high on the list, and perhaps the top reply.
Although the neon cross grabbed my attention, “Savior” was not a term I typically heard as a child. I suspect that my Methodist clergy friends will not be glad to hear that. Other than in the lyrics of Wesley hymns, ours was not a congregation that spoke easily of Jesus as Savior. Instead, Jesus was truly friend and teacher, who inspired us to goodness and love of neighbor.
My first recollection of hearing Jesus called “Savior” comes from a much more mundane source—A Charlie Brown Christmas, the classic holiday cartoon, first aired on television in 1965. I was six, my little brother four, and my sister a toddler. We gathered around the new color television, turned to CBS, and watched. Poor Charlie Brown! No one remembered the true meaning of Christmas. He was so depressed! At the climax of the show, he cried out in frustration, “Isn’t there anyone who knows what Christmas is all about?” His friend Linus stepped on stage and recited verses from Luke 2: “And the angel said unto them, Fear not . . . for unto you is born this day in the city of David, a Savior which is Christ the Lord.”
I looked over to the manger scene, newly purchased from Sears, that was set up in the living room. Mary, in her blue cloak, was on her knees leaning reverently toward her infant son, who was lying in a cradle of straw. Baby Jesus the Savior? My family did not talk this way, quoting scripture like that. People at my church would have shied away from expressing such religious sentiment in prime time—these words belonged in a pulpit or Sunday school classroom. I had no idea what I needed to be saved from and no clue what it meant, but it was a mysterious-sounding word, mesmerizing even. I liked it—“Savior”—and somehow I intuited what Linus was saying. This was the true meaning of Christmas. Born this day, a Savior. Born to Mary, born into each heart.
To understand at six and to understand when you are older are, of course, two different things, but learning a single word is often an invitation into a deeper faith, to go on a journey with an insight, an idea. At six, “Savior” invited me to wonder, to love Christmas. Eventually, “Savior” would prove the door into a much more encompassing faith, a way of belief that would, for a time at least, answer my questions.
Getting Saved
“Maybe we should sing?” a girl in the Bible study asked tentatively. “Something we all know?”
I expected one of the new songs I had recently learned at the church I was attending in Scottsdale, Arizona. I liked “Pass It On.” The words started playing in my mind:
It only takes a spark
to get a fire going . . .
That’s how it is with God’s love
once you’ve experienced it.
You spread his love to everyone,
you want to pass it on.
The song comforted me. It resonated with everything I had learned in Sunday school back in Baltimore.
Other than familiar theological sentiments, however, much had changed. In 1972, when I was thirteen, my parents uprooted us and moved to Arizona, leaving behind—and cutting ties with—family and community almost as completely as their ancestors had done a couple hundred years before when they left Europe and landed in the New World. And new world it was. Arizona is not Maryland. Everything was different: weather, food, landscape, people, and history—you name it. We didn’t even have grass in the yard to run around or roll downhill in. We had rocks.
And that is the perfect way to describe those first years in Arizona—a rocky adjustment. At first, Mom and Dad took us to the Methodist church in the neighborhood, where my brother and I were duly confirmed. After that, they lost interest in religion and stopped attending. On Sunday, my mother took to sleeping in; my father would take the Jeep out to the desert. She was depressed; he was increasingly distant. Sometimes, I would follow my mother’s lead; other times, I would join Dad.
Jesus might still be my teacher, but increasingly I skipped class. My new classmates and friends hailed from all over the United States, and a few from farther abroad; some of their parents had come from places like Jordan, Mexico, Austria, Cuba, and Argentina. And surprise! They were not all Methodists. They were Catholics, Jews, Presbyterians, Baptists, Episcopalians, and Mormons. We lived a scant mile from the Pima Indian community, and we encountered people who held ancient ideas about the land and practiced tribal rites. More intriguing than formal labels, perhaps, were other words people used to describe themselves: “charismatic,” “holy,” “agnostic,” “Bible-believing,” and “nondenominational.”
I missed Jesus, and I started tagging along with my friends to their worship services. By the time I was fifteen, I was attending on an ad hoc basis a Catholic charismatic Mass, Mormon “release time” for teens to study their holy book, Presbyterian youth events (with my first boyfriend), occasional bar and bat mitzvahs, Christian rock concerts, and more revival meetings than I can even remember. Fun, yes, but a bit theologically confusing.
Eventually, I settled in with some friends who went to Scottsdale Bible Church, then a small congregation that emphasized the Bible and Jesus and took faith very seriously. They never talked of Jesus as a teacher; instead, he was their Savior. They quoted the Bible constantly, especially John 3:16, their favorite verse: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” My friends spoke easily of sin, guilt, and freedom and confidently asserted that they would go to heaven and be with Jesus forever. Salvation meant being rescued from this world by Jesus, and they really looked forward to it, almost as if they wanted to die.
At my Methodist Confirmation, the minister had asked: “Do you confess Jesus Christ as your Savior?” I had learned that meant trusting in his grace and serving others. We had not really talked about sin and guilt or going to heaven in Confirmation class. When asked if I confessed Jesus as my Savior in the liturgy, I had happily answered, “I do.” The Methodist pastor who confirmed me talked more about service in this world than being saved in the next. Death, judgment, hell, and heaven—these were minor chords in my childhood church.
At the Bible Church, the order was reversed: nearly every question wound up being a question about sin and dying, and Jesus was the only answer. My new friends rarely spoke of doing good or serving others; their only worldly concerns were to become pastors, missionaries, or teachers in order to get others saved from the fire of eternal judgment.
“I know what we should sing,” one teen in the Bible study said. And then she started to hum the melody to “Jesus Loves Me.” I was still learning the Bible Church hymns and songs, but this one I knew. “Jesus loves me . . .” I began and then suddenly stopped. Everyone else in the circle was singing, “Jesus saves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.” Not “loves,” but “saves.” I quickly switched lyrical gears and hoped nobody had noticed my rookie mistake.
In this circle of teens, Jesus was not a tender friend or moral teacher. Instead, he was their Savior and the Savior of the world, the one who would reward them with heaven and punish all who did not believe in him. He died on the cross to cleanse them from sin, to take their place when God rightly judged them sinners. Jesus saved them from God’s eternal wrath. They trusted in him. They believed him. They put their lives in his hands. And they would be with him forever in heaven, not consigned to eternal nothingness.
Their faith burned as brightly as the neon cross back on Harford Road in Baltimore: Jesus saves.
Born Again
“Have you been born again?” my friend Phil asked me several weeks later. “Confessed your sins and given your life to Jesus? Is Jesus your Savior?”
“Yes,” I replied, somewhat sheepishly.
“Where? When?” he wanted to know.
I knew he would want a place and time. You had to have a “testimony” to fit in. I hesitated telling him that I had not confessed my sins—for I was not convinced that I was a sinner in the ways my new friends seemed to expect. There were heartbreaking stories about drugs and sex, about hating parents and pride, about cheating on tests and shoplifting, about lying to teachers and beating up “sissies” in the locker room. I had no idea that high school was such a soap opera and I had studiously avoided all those sins.
Sure, I had broken some rules, including getting in some bad arguments with my brother and, rather shamefully, having stolen quarters from my mother’s dressing table. Maybe I was overly proud of my good grades and a bit judgmental about my friends’ parties and drinking. But these things did not seem to qualify as the sorts of Big Sins the Bible Church seemed to expect. Maybe I was not bad enough to get saved. I was a good girl, obedient, generally kind, helpful, aghast when people were not nice, and always wanting to do the right things.
“Y-e-s. Yes,” I replied again, thinking about his question. I might not have a litany of sins to confess, but I did trust that Jesus was my Savior. Sin was not my problem as much as feeling lost. Dislocated, separated from everyone and everything I knew and loved, cut off from my roots. Unsure what to believe, even if the ground under my feet was hard and unyielding. I did not tell Phil how my uncle, after he arrived from Baltimore to visit, used to invade my bedroom at night. No, I did not sin. I was sinned against. Even at fifteen, however, I was smart enough to figure out that Phil would say that my lack of forgiveness was a sin.
Years later, I would come across these words from Jesus scholar Marcus Borg: “Some people do not feel much guilt . . . guilt is not the central issue in their lives. Yet they may have strong feelings of bondage, or strong feelings of alienation and estrangement.”1 For such people, the conventional rendering of Jesus as Savior, the one who takes away whatever is sinful and unclean in their lives, makes no sense. Borg insists, however, that there are other things from which one needed to be saved: victimization, meaninglessness, suffering. Jesus offers the “good news of ‘coming home’” from exile in the wilderness. He continues, “For some, the need is liberation; for others, the need is homecoming; and for still others, the need is acceptance.”2 No matter our experience or our deepest needs, Jesus saves. Homecoming. Yes, I needed a home, a safe and familiar home.
We often think of being “saved” as being rescued, and when it comes to Jesus as Savior, the popular conception is one of Jesus snatching believers from the perils of hell. Jesus saves us by taking us to heaven. That is not, however, what the word “salvation” means. The word “salvation” comes from the Latin salvus, which originally referred to being made whole, uninjured, safe, or in good health. Salvus was not about being taken out of this life; it was about this life being healed. In this sense, salvus perfectly describes the biblical vision of God’s justice and mercy, peace and well-being, comfort and equanimity. This is the dream of a saved earth—one where oppression ends, mercy reigns, violence ceases to exist, and all live safely under their own “vine and fig tree.” Jesus the Savior is the one who brings this dream to reality: he is peacemaker, light of justice, and the good physician.3 Jesus saves in all these ways and more.
But even in this strange and rocky land, Jesus had found me. Or I had found Jesus again. He was consistent and present—my friend, my teacher of love. Yet he was also becoming something more, offering safety and the possibility of wholeness. Yes, Jesus saved me. From the desert wilderness. I did not think lostness qualified as a sin at Scottsdale Bible Church, but Jesus certainly was a guide and companion here and now, the one who wept with me at night. My savior.
Had I realized this during Communion at church? While walking to school? At Bible study? Around a backyard campfire at youth group? I really did not know. But I sensed that Phil and I were not speaking quite the same language.
“At youth group in August,” I replied to his question. “When we were singing ‘I Wish We’d All Been Ready.’”
I had felt something there, a warmth, the same warmth I knew in Sunday school or when walking in the woods. Always when singing hymns. No sense telling him I had known Jesus my whole life. A day and a time were necessary to be saved. It was the sort of answer they expected, an answer guaranteeing that I fit in, that I could be part of the group. It was not really a lie, or maybe just a little white one. Had I just fibbed about being saved?
But Phil smiled. I had passed the test. “May I pray with you?” he asked.
There, sitting at his house, he prayed me through the “Sinner’s Prayer,” just to make sure I got the words right. Lost, found, saved. I went from a sad and lonely teen, missing home, to Jesus girl. I stopped attending all those other churches. Not only had I found Jesus, but a new family came with the deal. I had a brand-new Bible covered in a quilted cozy, an “I Found It!” bumper sticker on my car, and Christian music blaring on my record player. I sang along:
Now my life is changed, it’s rearranged.
When I think of my past I feel so strange,
Wowie, zowie, well he saved my soul.
He’s the rock that doesn’t roll.4
Stability. Certainty. The surest of all foundations. I memorized John 3:16, passed out tracts, and witnessed to my parents and non-Christian friends. I read every Christian book I could, prayed more, studied the Bible, and learned stories of great missionaries and preachers. The youth pastor told me that it was “too bad” that I was a girl—because if I were a boy, I could go to seminary. He assured me that I would become a great pastor’s wife. If, of course, I learned to play the piano. This was a whole new world, a new life. Born again. I was sure of that.
And I fixed the bedroom door. Yep, Jesus saved me—with a little help from Yale locks.
Sin and Death
My new church friends loved to talk about theology. In order to keep up, I had to learn a new vocabulary of faith. There were all sorts of mysterious-sounding words, most of which started with either pre- or omni-. Like “predestination” (which came in one of two forms, single or double; who knew?) and “premillennialism,” the first having to do with free will, the latter with judgment. It was hard to keep them straight. And big terms about God: “omnipresence,” “omnipotence,” and “omniscience,” meaning God was everywhere, all-powerful, and all-knowing. There were other new words too, like “inerrancy,” “submission,” and “dispensationalism” (about the Bible, women, and the end times). They sounded crisp and authoritative, words that demanded attention and allegiance, and they beckoned to a world of knowledge I did not know existed.
Sometimes I wondered if my Methodist Sunday school education had been totally worthless, for I had no clue what my Bible Church friends were saying. If nothing else, I was glad to be a quick study. When some of my friends joined Scottsdale Bible Church, they gave away—or destroyed—their secular rock albums. Divesting oneself of such worldly distractions and replacing the devil’s music with good Christian rock were considered almost as important as being baptized.
For me, it was not albums. It was novels. Long-loved books like Little Women, Jane Eyre, A Wrinkle in Time, The Witch of Blackbird Pond, and Anne of Green Gables disappeared from my shelves and were slowly replaced with cheap grocery-store editions of books by evangelical pastors like Chuck Smith, Tim LaHaye, Hal Lindsey, Bill Gothard, and Josh McDowell. Seeing that I was theologically precocious, the youth pastor recommended C. S. Lewis and John Stott for their more intellectual takes on tough questions. Clearly, being born again meant reading a lot of books, and I busily set myself to proving that I was up to the task. I read myself into a new universe of faith, one dominated by a great savior, a Jesus who hated sin and delivered the world from death.
This theological world was, if nothing else, orderly and internally logical. It was a lot like figuring out a puzzle. Somehow, all these words fit together and created a new picture of Jesus, of church. And the key piece to the whole was sin. The Bible Church loved talking about sin, worrying about sin, fighting sin, confessing sin, and forgiving sin. Of course, most Christians care about sin. Honestly, many—if not most—religions are concerned with it. But these particular Christians were consumed by it. And, despite the fact that my Methodist upbringing had taught me about sin, I quickly learned that the way the Bible Church understood sin and what I thought to be sin were not exactly the same.
Growing up, I thought sin was doing naughty things. Sinning meant breaking commandments or bending rules—not loving your neighbor, not doing what Jesus would want you to do. There were little sins and big ones. We might look askance if someone committed a big sin, but we were equally confident that somehow Jesus forgave everyone. With mended lives, trying to do better, we moved on.
But my new friends did not share these ideas. To them, all sin was the same. If you sinned, even a tiny little sin only once, you deserved hell. The consequence of sin was death. Period. No excuses. No bargaining with God, no getting off the hook. I may not have felt terribly guilty, but I was afraid of death. Even though I suspected I was more sinned against than sinner, the sermons at the Bible Church drove the point home week after week. No one was without sin, not one. God hates sin, and anyone who sinned would be banished from God’s sight forever. Hell threatened.
Nearly every sermon, every Bible study, every conversation included some variation on this theme. I asked, “Even if I am only mad at my brother?” The answer came swiftly in the form of a Bible verse that likened anger to murder: “I say to you that if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgment” (Matt. 5:22). Maybe I should feel guilty, I thought. Maybe I was awful. Maybe I deserved hell. Although the church promised the Good News of salvation, I began to feel as though it really preached the bad news of being human. “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Rom. 3:23) was the refrain. I learned that verse by heart because people quoted it all the time.
I heard this referred to as “original sin,” a term to describe the state of corrupted human nature. Why do human beings do bad things? Where did evil originate? These are basic questions of human experience, concerns that religion and philosophy have attempted to answer for thousands of years. Christianity responds that sin is nearly as old as the human race itself: Adam and Eve disobeyed God when tempted by Satan. That act, the first rebellion, shattered the harmony of creation and ushered in violence and death. From one sin came all sin, cosmic consequences that none can escape.
Despite the near universality of questions about sin and evil, early Christians were not overly concerned with these ideas. In the New Testament, there is only one major passage teaching that human beings are totally sinful (Rom. 5:12–21). And even the first creeds and councils (in the 300s) are far more focused on God and the nature of Jesus than they are about the human predicament.
Eventually, some prominent Christian thinkers sensed there was a connection between how we understand Jesus and how we understand ourselves. In the 200s, almost two centuries after Jesus died, theologians like Irenaeus wrote about the sacredness of the universe, creation, and human bodies. Irenaeus, a Greek who had studied in Turkey in the East, lived in Gaul (now France). As the conversation regarding human nature developed, a rift emerged between Christians in the eastern and western parts of the Roman Empire. Eastern theologians understood creation as good and maintained that the original goodness had been disordered and obscured—but not destroyed—by sin. Adam’s sin revealed the human propensity to sin, and we are each guilty when we, like our first parents, choose sin.
But Western thinkers crafted a different approach, arguing that sin was literally passed from parent to child and that sin was an inescapable inherited condition of a fallen world. The Western idea was expressed most fully by Augustine (354–430), who believed that the entire human race was a massa damnata, a “condemned mass,” mired in self-gratification, pride, and lust, as guilty for their sins as Adam had been for his because Adam’s stain was imprinted on each and every human ever born. We are completely helpless to ever choose the good, and the penalty for sin is death and hell. And thus we all deserve the ultimate consequence for sin: physical death and eternal separation from God. This stark view shaped Roman Catholicism and Protestantism, spawning ideas that went on to be rehearsed by generations of Western Christians in catechisms, prayers, and primers: “In Adam’s fall sinned we all.”
The people at Scottsdale Bible were not terribly interested in what Augustine thought—or if there were different ideas in the ancient church. They were opposed to tradition, seeing it as a Catholic thing, and a human invention. Tradition itself was a product of sin. If some in the past may have gotten things right, it was because they read the Bible, not because they followed teachings of church councils. They believed the Bible taught that Adam and Eve sinned, and they passed sin down to the rest of us through sex. And they believed that Paul taught that. Case closed.
“All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” After all, Paul said it, right there in the letter to the Romans. Those at the Bible Church never imagined they were heirs of a long line of interpretation of those scriptures, a line that stretched back to an ancient argument won, in Western Christianity at least, by Augustine. Years later, I would hear a seminary professor—the only female professor I had—refer to Augustine as the “long shadow” over the West.
I was a tenderhearted teenage girl, very willing to believe elders who insisted I was a sinner from birth, a miserable offender, rightly condemned to death. No one, of course, informed me that there was a big fight in early Christianity about these ideas, and that to this day Eastern Orthodox Christians think their Western kin are far too pessimistic about human nature.
No one mentioned that in Romans Paul was writing to a church where Gentile Christians and Jewish Christians had become estranged, mostly through external politics of the Roman Empire, and that the apostle was trying to reconcile the two groups. “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” is part of Paul’s polemic making the point that both Gentile Christians and Jewish Christians hold wrongheaded views of one another and each is guilty of hypocrisy. He is mostly concerned with maintaining that the two groups are one—that they “are equals in the solidarity of failure and in the solidarity of grace.”5
Indeed, the idea that everyone sins all the time runs contrary to other parts of scripture, including Paul’s own self-description of being both righteous and blameless (Phil. 3:6). As one commentary puts it, “Paul’s argument [about human sinfulness] should not be universalized but understood as a polemical diatribe against hypothetical accusers.”6 The freedom Paul described in Romans is more like the liberation of slaves, harkening back to the oppression of the Israelites in Egypt, surely not a fate they deserved. According to Paul, God frees all humanity—Gentile and Jew—from such slavery, and together those who follow Jesus are transformed through faith.7 The emphasis is not that we are all terrible sinners through and through. Rather, the emphasis is that human beings are equals, all capable of both messing up and living faithfully. And God provides a way through Jesus to heal what is broken and make it whole, liberating human beings from wounded lives.
In 1983, as I was sitting in a classroom at an evangelical seminary, the professor was holding forth on the doctrine of sin in American theology. Early New England theology was in the line of Augustine, as interpreted by John Calvin and Jonathan Edwards, complete with sophisticated arguments about the nature of the will but still maintaining a doctrine of utter human depravity. In the 1820s, however, Yale theologian Nathaniel William Taylor dared to question these ideas and, as my professor said with more than a hint of malice in his tone, taught that “sin is in the sinning” and human beings were not corrupt by nature.8 Taylor upended New England theology, resulting in debates, heresy charges, and a split within the church.
Although the professor went on in detail about the controversy—known as the Taylor-Tyler debate—I got lost in a single line: “Sin is in the sinning.” When he quoted Taylor, I looked up from my notes and stared at him. Sin is in the sinning. That’s what I thought, what I always thought. There is some good in us, however wounded, however damaged, however obscured—an intuition, a whisper, a memory of some other way of being. Sin is not our nature; rather, goodness is. Sin is a choice, the wrong path. I remembered my own conversion, a kind of turning, what scripture referred to as metanoia, returning to the deepest part of myself, finding the path again after having lost my way, rediscovering the road I knew I was intended to travel.
I looked around the classroom. Everyone else was taking notes. No one else seemed to hear “sin is in the sinning.” I looked back to the professor. “Taylor,” he explained, “was not orthodox. Tyler defended the true faith, biblical Christianity.” So sin is in the sinning—not orthodox. I looked back down, scribbling away: Taylor bad, Tyler good. That would be on the exam. I did not want to be the only heretic in the room. Seminary taught me one thing: ignore the promptings of your own heart; your experience does not matter. Theology is a matter of submission to ideas shaped by men who were smarter than you. Orthodoxy is everything. Keep your head down.
That same semester, I also took a course at a neighboring seminary, not an evangelical one, but a school associated with the long history of New England Congregationalism. Unlike my seminary, it actually had women on the faculty (my seminary had one), and I wound up taking a class on medieval history from the Rev. Dr. Eleanor McLaughlin, an Episcopal priest and noted scholar. One day, the announced title on the syllabus was “Celtic Christianity.” Professor McLaughlin entered the classroom and walked past the lectern. Instead of standing in front of us, she knelt on the floor and lit a candle. As she fanned the flame, she prayed:
I will kindle my fire this morning
In presence of the holy angels of heaven . . .
Without malice, without jealousy, without envy,
Without fear, without terror of any one under the sun,
But the Holy Son of God to shield me.
God, kindle Thou in my heart within
A flame of love to my neighbor.9
No one at my seminary would dream of starting a lecture in such a way. After the prayer, she said: “This is the Celtic way. Everything is holy, every moment, everything, and everyone. Christ came to reveal the sacredness of all things, to make clear what was hidden, the Light of the world.” She went on to say that one Celtic teacher, a monk named Pelagius from Wales, taught the “dignity of our human nature,” something that can be seen in the face of a newborn child. She quoted Pelagius: “You ought to measure the good of human nature by reference to its Creator. If it is he who has made the world good, exceedingly good, how much more excellent do you suppose that he has made humanity, fashioned in his own image and likeness?”10
Without malice, without jealousy, without envy, without fear, without terror of any one under the sun, but the Holy Son of God to shield me. Whatever this was, it was far closer to what my heart said was true than anything I was being taught at the other place. Savior . . . or shield?
I wanted to jump up from behind my desk and join her on the floor.
I did not. But I did take another course from her—her doctoral level seminar on Augustine. We revisited Pelagius then and the angry fight between the two men. She made us read Augustine’s anti-Pelagian writings, explore the alternative argument by reading through the criticism, and take into consideration the political backdrop of imperial Christianity, with its needs for consolidation and control of the Mediterranean world. Eventually, the Roman Church declared Pelagius a heretic (although it took about six tries to do so) and attempted to erase his teachings from the face of the earth.
I wrote a very conflicted paper on the whole business. I so wanted to be orthodox, but I secretly believed Augustine the villain and Pelagius the hero. In the end I toed the party line—total depravity, original sin. I said what I was expected to say, not by Professor McLaughlin, but by the evangelicals at the other seminary, just in case they got wind of my questions. And it was the only B I received in my seminary career.
I would later understand that my sin in the whole affair was not being myself, subordinating the gifts and insight I brought to studying history and theology to what others insisted I must believe (under, I must add, the threat of hell). I allowed myself to be colonized by a system that wanted to silence me and participated in the kind of obedience that slaughters the soul. I found myself in a theological cage, one, sadly, that I helped to build. My sin was not pride; I did not want to be God. My sin was the negation of my own self, in effect killing myself in favor of the person others told me I must be.11 Sin does indeed lead to death.
Eventually, I learned that Irenaeus was right when he said, “The glory of God is the human being fully alive.” Sin is the rejection of the beauty and goodness of God’s image in every person. Jesus lived such fullness perfectly, and he revealed the deep wisdom of that truth; Christ the Word speaks this into the world. The Light of the World, the flame of our hearts. Jesus saves.
The Cross
Scottsdale Bible Church was devoid of image and icon. It featured clear windows high in the ceiling, plain light wood, and folding chairs. The only signal that this was a Christian worship place were the three huge crosses that stood outside the church, harkening back to Calvary, the hill where Jesus died.
Architecture always makes a point: what people care about, how they witness to their story is communicated through their buildings and art. In most Christian churches, the cross is central. Sometimes, it is a simple cross, sometimes a cross bearing the dying Jesus, and sometimes a cross with Christ the King. Crosses are everywhere, above altars and Communion tables, at doorways and exits, on baptismal fonts, atop soaring steeples. If you had no experience of Christianity whatsoever and were touring churches, surely one of the first questions you would ask would be: “What does that symbol mean?” In a solemn tone, your host would reply, perhaps with some minor variation, “Jesus died for our sins.”
At Scottsdale Bible, however, the cross was central in a singular way. There were no saints or icons or Bible stories in stained glass to serve as comment on or explanation of the three crosses reaching into the desert sky. As stark as Good Friday itself, they made a theological point about the faith being proclaimed within: everything was about the cross, about salvation.
In Bible study, one of the leaders referred to what happened on the cross as “atonement,” a word I had not heard before. “What does that mean?” I asked.
He replied, “Atonement means ‘at-one-ment.’”
“At-one-ment?” I queried.
“Yes,” he went on. “How we are reconciled with God, how we come into relationship with him, are made ‘one’ through the cross.”
I nodded as if I understood.
For those at Scottsdale Bible, it was simple. If human beings are completely sinful and God is utterly holy, there is an infinite distance between the two. Sin makes it impossible for people to reach toward God. On the off chance that someone did reach out to the divine, God could not reach back, because God is repulsed by sin. God’s holiness would not allow any impurity to come into God’s presence. What is holy and what is sinful can never, ever touch.
And there is our predicament. We can never be one with God—we cannot even be in the same room, the same house, or even the same universe with God—without some sort of God-initiated “at-one-ment.” In the absence of atonement, we human beings would be eternally separate from the Holy One. Sin makes atonement necessary. Impurity makes some sort of divine cleansing imperative.
If I were Jewish, I would have known the word “atonement.” I would later learn that Jews have a Day of Atonement—Yom Kippur—first presented in Leviticus 16 as a yearly purification rite. In ancient practice, animal blood was offered as a sacrifice in the Temple to cleanse the sacred precinct and atone for the sins of the people. This was the holiest day of the year. After the Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed in 70 CE, around the time the New Testament itself was being written, the Day of Atonement became a time of reflection, fasting, and prayers during which the Jewish people sought God’s forgiveness and assurance of mercy for the coming year.
In the New Testament, Paul took these ideas and developed an elaborate theological argument that connected the death of Jesus on the cross with the Day of Atonement from the Leviticus tradition. Since Paul was a Jew, it is helpful to remember that he is reflecting on a Jewish practice that was being rethought within Judaism itself. In Romans, immediately following “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,” Paul writes with “grace as a gift” through Christ. How does this gift come to humankind? “As a sacrifice of atonement by his blood,” Paul insists (3:23–25), directly appropriating Yom Kippur. In effect, Paul says that Jesus is the final sacrifice, the “Pascal lamb,” whose blood covered all human sin once and for all and whose death ended the need for all other sacrifice.
Thus, Paul linked sin, grace, and atonement in a single, lean argument, making the cross the central—and holiest—action of salvation. When Christians meditate upon the cross, when they lift the cross up as the image of faith, they enter into this theological understanding of sacrifice and atonement, somehow seeing God as a sacrificing priest, and Jesus as the offering on the altar or the scapegoat carrying the sins of the people into the wilderness. Good Friday becomes the Christian version of the Day of Atonement, and Easter Sunday seals the deal three days later, when Jesus destroyed even death, the final and most feared consequence of sin.
None of this is easy to understand—neither the history of sacrifice, the arguments over the nature of sin, nor Paul’s complex retelling of the atonement from Leviticus. Any first-year seminarian trying to translate Paul’s Greek will tell you how hard it is to follow the good apostle’s argument and how its implications wind through the rest of Paul’s letters and the letters ascribed to him. Paul insists that this is the main thing, the central act of Christianity, this salvific sacrifice that repristinated Yom Kippur, linked it with Passover, and then replaced both with the cross. It is not an entirely surprising argument for an early Jewish convert to make.
At the Bible Church, they loved to tell this story—in Bible studies, in sermons, in hymns. This was the old, old story of a fountain filled with the blood of the Lamb, the rugged cross to which everyone must flee for mercy, the great wonder of a God who killed his own Son because he loved us. Paul was the hero who told the tale, and his words were repeated as the way to eternal life. Jesus took God’s punishment for sin; Jesus died for me. Jesus bought and paid for me with his blood.
Despite the fact that my new friends revered Paul and that this rendering of the atonement was the central story of faith, no one seemed to notice that Paul explained the cross in more than one way. In addition to the sacrifice narrative, Paul also wrote of the atonement in relation to the tradition of scapegoat, as redemption, justification, reconciliation, and adoption into a new family. Paul’s letters explore six different theological versions of Christ’s work on the cross, and sometimes he combines them. Each of these metaphors offers a slightly different angle for understanding atonement—the scapegoat cleansed the community of sin; slaves were redeemed from bondage; justification makes our character right, in line with God’s desire; through reconciliation the world is brought back into relationship with God; and by adoption God is revealed as our loving parent.12 Paul’s sacrificial view of the atonement was, perhaps, the harshest of the six and, in the history of Christianity, the one empowered by fear of death and hell, but it is far from the only rendering possible, even in the authentic writings of the great apostle himself.
Yet Protestant Christians, and even a good number of Catholics, are not aware of the multiplicity of images for atonement and are, instead, stuck in the single story of sacrifice. A strange vision of God lies under the story—that God is angry with humankind and must have that rage assuaged. One scholar insists that we secretly think God must be appeased: “Fear is the underlying psychological motivation in sacrifice; life is unsafe, the Deity is not always favorable; he must be won over.”13 It is a primal human worry that God hates us and will do us in. We must do anything to make God happy, to keep God from punishing or getting rid of us altogether. We sacrifice to change God’s mind, we offer up to pay off God.
Although it seems crass to put it that way, my friends at the Bible Church would have said this is true. That is the reason God sent Jesus. No offering we could ever make would be enough. Only one offering—God’s own Son—was sufficient. The atonement was a sacred quid pro quo. God forgives us in exchange for an offering of blood. Salvation’s this for that. In this case, however, God gives both the quid and the quo, and we stand by watching, accepting in faith what God did on our behalf.
Strangely, no one mentioned that this vision of atonement does not appear in the gospels; the books about Jesus’s life are largely silent on these ideas. Many scholars agree that the closest the gospels get to Paul’s sacrificial atonement theory is Mark 10:45, a short verse that may not even be original to the text: “For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.” Even there, however, the larger context is more about equality and service. “If salvation came only as a consequence of his crucifixion,” writes New Testament scholar Stephen Finlan, “Jesus certainly forgot to mention this to those people who came to him seeking salvation.”14
In one of the most well-known gospel passages, a rich young man asked Jesus how to be saved:
As he was setting out on a journey, a man ran up and knelt before him, and asked him, “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus said to him, “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone. You know the commandments: ‘You shall not murder; You shall not commit adultery; You shall not steal; You shall not bear false witness; You shall not defraud; Honor your father and mother.’” He said to him, “Teacher, I have kept all these since my youth.” Jesus, looking at him, loved him and said, “You lack one thing; go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.” When he heard this, he was shocked and went away grieving, for he had many possessions. (Mark 10:17–22)
When we read this in Bible study, I was shocked. Jesus did not tell the man to believe in him, to get born again, or pray the sinner’s prayer—none of the things a person seeking salvation would be told if they asked someone at Scottsdale Bible. Instead, Jesus asked if he kept the commandments. The man did. And then Jesus said, “Go sell everything you have and give the money to the poor; then come back and follow me.” Jesus was concerned for the man’s character, what he did. Even more, salvation did not seem to be a single act of confession; rather, it was the result of following Jesus.
The youth pastor carefully explained that although this sounded like salvation by works, it was not. He insisted that Jesus laid down an impossible demand to show that human beings would never be able to follow him without the cross. “Jesus told him he’d have to surrender the one thing he could never give up,” he said. “We can never give up enough for God.” We took notes or scribbled on the pages of our Bibles.
“The rich young man would come back,” the pastor assured us, “when he realized that he needed to be born again.” Ah! The story might have a second act! The sad man would understand that his works would never save him. He would return, repent of trying to save his own soul by works, accept Jesus in his heart, get born again, and become a true disciple. Honestly, that sounded like a bit of a stretch.
And it was not just the rich young man who asked Jesus how to be saved. All sorts of people in the gospels got saved before Jesus died on the cross. When Jesus healed, they experienced salvus, God’s salvation. They followed him. Lives were changed, transformed. Disciples did give up riches and goods that they might inherit eternal life. Tax collectors abandoned their jobs and surrendered their social standing to eat with him. Children, slaves, soldiers, peasants, fishermen, farmers, prisoners, the sick, the blind, the lame—when they encountered Jesus, they found salvation, the wholeness, the healing, the oneness with God that had only been the stuff of longing. Every miracle, every act of hospitality, all the bread broken and wine served, everything that Jesus did saved people long before Rome arrested and murdered him.
It was all this loving and healing and saving that got him in trouble with authorities. He was not killed so his death would save people; he was killed because he was already saving them. He threatened a world based in fear, one held in the grip of Roman imperialism, by proving that a community could gather in love, set a table of plenty, and live in peace with a compassionate God. Jesus did at-one-ment long before being nailed to a cross. At-one-ment was the reason the authorities did away with him. No empire can stand if the people it oppresses figure out that reconciliation, love, liberation, and oneness hold more power than the sword. So Rome lynched Jesus: tortured him and hung him on a tree. That is the raw truth under all those sophisticated atonement theories.
Jesus was born a savior, and he saved during his lifetime. “Fear not!” “Peace on earth!” He did not wait around for thirty-three years and suddenly become a savior in an act of ruthless, bloody execution. Indeed, the death was senseless, stupid, shameful, evil. It meant little other than silence without the next act—resurrection—God’s final word that even the most brutal of empires cannot destroy salvus. This is no quid pro quo. Rather, Easter proclaims that God overcomes all oppression and injustice, even the murder of an innocent one. At-one-ment means just that. Through Jesus, all will be renewed, made whole, brought back into oneness, reunited with God. Salvation is not a transaction to get to heaven after death; rather, it is an experience of love and beauty and of paradise here and now. No single metaphor, not even one of Paul’s, can truly describe this. We need a prism of stories to begin to understand the cross and a lifetime to experience it.
The End Times
The best thing about the Bible Church was that I no longer feared dying. The worst thing was that I became terrified about the imminent end of the world! Getting born again meant I would go to heaven. There was something I could actually do to push aside worries of eternal emptiness. But the end of the world? There was literally nothing I could do about that except read the signs of the times and wait for God’s plan to unfold. At least that is how they explained it. The Bible Church essentially replaced one anxiety with another. It was fear that opened the door to this new theological world, and it would be fear that held me there.
In the 1970s, Americans seemed preoccupied with beginnings and endings. It is true that human beings are perennially curious about such things. Where did we come from? Where are we going?
In 1968, Chariots of the Gods became an international megahit, eventually selling more than seventy million copies. It was a nearly perfect creation story for the Space Age, claiming that we humans were the offspring of ancient astronauts. At the other end of the spectrum, Star Trek embodied the future we dreamed about. Every day, we were told that the world could end by nuclear war. Yet Star Trek, in a spirit of optimism, assured us that the human race would avert disaster and, instead, embark on a peaceful exploration to find meaning and purpose in the universe. As mythology, Chariots explained the beginning, and Star Trek offered a compelling end.
That conservative evangelicals, like the folks at the Bible Church, would have been interested in beginnings and endings should be no surprise. After all, Jesus said, “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end” (Rev. 22:13). When it came to beginnings, however, they found the mythology offered by Chariots as wanting as Darwin’s theory of evolution. During these years, biblical literalists revived an old attack on evolution under the guise of “scientific creationism,” insisting that Genesis is a factual account of creation and emphasizing the young-earth theory. Creation scientists posited an intelligent and purposeful creator who intervened—and continues to intervene—in human history. In 1968, the American Supreme Court struck down all laws banning the teaching of evolution that remained on the books of some states, and conservative Christians went to legal war in order to get equal time for the teaching of their mythological views on the basis that Genesis is not a myth at all. Rather, they insisted, Genesis is science.
Thus, “origins” in biblical creationism, an idea that had been pushed to the culture’s margins since the 1920s, reemerged slowly with the growth of evangelical Christianity and the religious right. But it would prove a long process of court cases, writing textbooks, building megachurches, homeschooling, and establishing institutes to gain cultural credibility. The conservative story of the beginning, rebirthed in the 1960s and 1970s, would require a lengthy fight to change the culture.
Not so with evangelicals’ story of the ending, however. As tedious as courts and scientific arguments would be in inhibiting the quick spread of their creation myth, evangelicals had at the ready a story about the ending that was flashier, more in line with the cultural moment, and packed with an emotional punch. The world was about to end, and they knew the details. No Star Trek optimism there. Just bleak fact: the end of history is upon us; it is God’s plan.
In the 1970s, evangelicals did not sugarcoat endings. For baby boomers, having grown up hiding under school desks during nuclear-war drills, the possibility of the end of the world seemed true enough. None of us believed that our grade-school teacher’s closing of lead-lined drapes would save our lives in a nuclear holocaust. But that the world would end like that seemed random and purposeless—that someone somewhere would accidently press a button and all human history would come screeching to its bloody conclusion. No heroism, nothing to live or die for, only the stupidest of endings to life. We had reached the last days without much of anything as an escape. We were so young. It was all very sad.
Enter evangelicals with their message: the end is not without purpose.15 God intended the world to end, ever since the beginning. Jesus himself warned of the last days:
But in those days, after that suffering,
the sun will be darkened,
and the moon will not give its light,
and the stars will be falling from heaven,
and the powers in the heavens will be shaken. (Mark 13:24–25)
But this would not be a curse to us—because we were saved. Yes, we were sinners, but we were born again, freed from sin, and could expect life with God in heaven. However, we also needed to be saved from the ugly mess of the world, rescued from these evil days.
Christians group sin, atonement, and heaven into a triad of “problem,” “solution,” and “eternal results,” but different traditions do not explain the connections between the three in the same way. Catholics, for instance, talk about original sin and the cross, but emphasize the sacraments and church as the mediators of the work of atonement, promising (at the very least) purgatory to those seeking to follow Jesus. Traditional Protestants emphasize sin, with baptism and faith applying the atonement, and trust that heaven will be open to most (if not all) humankind. Catholics and mainstream Protestants, for all their gloominess about sin and their willingness to motivate sinners with fear, generally believe that those who trust Jesus’s work on the cross make the world better—and that their good works demonstrate God’s love and shape Christian character, both of which form the soul for eternity. The best rendering of these ideas is that sorrow over sin, trust in the cross, and fear of hell ultimately make for a moral life filled with charity, beauty, and great compassion, and lead to a faithful death.
Evangelicals told a radically different story of sin, cross, and heaven. In their version, sin was so extensive that no matter how many people converted, the world would get worse and worse. The atonement only worked for individual believers who clung to the cross amid the buffeting winds of this evil existence, and the fact that human history was coming to an end. To them, the world ending in chaos was actually a good thing. Increasing evil proved that Jesus’s return was close at hand. True believers would always be a minority whose calling was to save as many as they could before that return. At God’s appointed time, a truly vile man would arise whom many would mistake for the savior. He would actually be the Antichrist, and under his wicked rule God would unleash seven years of tribulation—including everything from famine to nuclear war—followed by a huge battle between good and evil, called Armageddon. At its height, Jesus would return and establish his earthly reign. After one thousand years, there would be a final judgment, and this world would be replaced with a new heaven and a new earth.
Their version was so much more specific than anything I had ever heard about sin, death, and eternity. And it was frightening, cosmic in scope. This was not just a case of one sad teenager worrying over eternal nothingness. This was a story of the actual end of everything, not just me. There was, however, one remarkable hope: before the Tribulation Jesus would return in secret and snatch believers up to heaven, where we would escape the conflagration of the last days. This was what every Christian wished for—to be part of the generation that would not die, but go straight from this life to Jesus’s arms when he returned to take the saints, both living and dead, to heaven. We were not just born again, not just saved from sin—we were going to be saved from physical death to be with the Lord: “Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place. Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away” (Mark 13:30–31).
These were the last days. We were the last generation. What a hope! To live and never die. Jesus would rescue the faithful and keep the born again safe from harm while the planet destroyed itself. “Two will be in the field; one will be taken and one will be left,” Jesus warned. “Two women will be grinding meal together; one will be taken and one will be left. Keep awake therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming” (Matt. 24:40–42).
Around campfires and at Bible studies, we sang “I Wish We’d All Been Ready.” The tune was plaintive, the words both a threat and a comfort, often punctuated by sobs as we lifted our voices:
Life was filled with guns and war
And all of us got trampled on the floor.
I wish we’d all been ready.
The children died, the days grew cold,
A piece of bread could buy a bag of gold.
I wish we’d all been ready.
There’s no time to change your mind,
The son has come and you’ve been left behind.
No one wanted to be left behind. None of us thought we would be, for we were all saved. No one, however, wanted friends or family to be left behind. Occasionally, the song was evangelism, words directed toward the unbelieving parents of someone in our Bible study. But mostly it was a reminder. God would save us from the coming Tribulation. We would be raptured. We would escape the end of the world, watching the earth suffer from the safe distance of heaven with Jesus.
It never occurred to me that the early Christians wanted to escape too. The longing for Christ’s return was not unique to 1970s America. There is an apocalyptic thread running through the New Testament, leading some scholars to argue that Jesus was primarily a prophet who truly believed that the end was near—and that the kingdom of God was imminent.16 The first generation of Christians fully expected that history was about to reach consummation. Jesus, Savior and Messiah, had arrived to set God’s people free from Roman oppression, to defeat the empire and establish the hoped-for “age to come.”
Jesus lived at a time fraught with cosmic meaning, when a political tyrant was asserting power throughout the Mediterranean world, slowly acquiring divinity to shore up geographic ambitions and replacing local religions and customs with new cosmopolitan globalist ones. Jesus was born into a Jewish world struggling with imperial colonization, where resistance groups and those willing to be complicit with the colonizers disliked each other. The Jews were an embattled people, a persecuted religious sect doing its best to survive.
“The time is fulfilled,” Jesus proclaimed in his first sermon, “and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news” (Mark 1:15). That must have seemed good news to those longing for divine justice against the Roman usurpers. Not every Jew believed Jesus, but enough did that he and his followers created controversies with other Jews and, eventually, with Roman authorities as well. After three years of public ministry, the Romans killed Jesus, and his followers were both disappointed and confused. They wrapped the story of Jesus’s death with the proclamation of resurrection, the proof that sin and death were destroyed and the new age had begun.
But after the Resurrection, Jesus’s followers waited—and waited—and waited for him to return in triumph. Months stretched into years, years into decades, decades into centuries. No kingdom, no return. Early Christian thinkers, like Paul, addressed the concern that believers were dying and still Jesus tarried. Later theologians turned Jesus’s urgent words into figurative language about the last things. Nobody, of course, wanted to say that Jesus was wrong to have expected the kingdom, or that he had misread the eschatological time line. At the Bible Church, the pastors recognized there was a chronology problem in the New Testament about the last days. They reminded us that a thousand years were as a day to the Lord. Jesus was not wrong. Instead, we did not understand time. What seems a long time to us is only Jesus “tarrying” so that millions more may be born, be born again, and one day be taken to heaven.
My mother never offered up the end times and a coming kingdom when I had cried out at night, afraid of death. She had never heard of the Rapture, did not know that a generation would never die. Learning all this freed me from my childhood fears, but a new anxiety stalked me: What would the Rapture be like? When would it come? Would I really be ready? Was I awake?
I discovered I was not alone in those fears. Quietly, my new friends confessed that they were frightened by these doctrines, obsessed by the possibility that they might not truly be saved and worried that they would be left behind—alone—when Jesus returned and took their faithful parents. Churches showed a film called A Thief in the Night at youth events, and its opening scene of a ticking clock and a breaking news report of the Rapture kept me and my peers awake at night.
On top of everything else, we were conflicted. Everyone wanted to be raptured. But few wanted the Rapture to happen before they found true love, married, and had sex (in that order). It would be good for Jesus to come, just not quite yet. We wanted to live. At least a little. We didn’t want to tell our parents, but Heaven could wait.
Although the whole business of Jesus as Savior depended upon sin and depravity, a sacrifice to get us to heaven, and the terror of an apocalypse, we still wanted to live. To love, to work, to know passion, to create and procreate, to experience joy. To grow old. Here was an entire, oddly compelling theological system to explain sin and death, yet even we, teenagers who in some way bought into it, longed for something else, a different sort of savior. None of us wanted to look in the face of a lover and say, “You are going to hell unless you accept Jesus in your heart,” or declare that our newborn baby was a sinner from birth, or believe that a lynching was God’s will and that blood running down a tree made for peace. Would Jesus really come like a thief in the night and snatch us from the Tribulation, only to make us heavenly voyeurs of the mayhem broken loose on earth? Would we cheer the arrival of Armageddon and the destruction of our planet?
We knew it was not true, even when we insisted it was. Whenever we joked, “Wait, Jesus, wait,” we were confessing that this whole structure of salvation ran counter to something deeply and beautifully human. Maybe, just maybe, Jesus had more to do with living life than with escaping it. To admit that, however, was heresy.
Christianity has often been given to proclamations of disaster feeding off fear, from visions written down on the isle of Patmos, through apocalyptic visions of Franciscan monks who believed the world would end in 1260, to Americans fleeing to the hills in 1844 confident of Jesus’s momentary return. Those with visions of fiery judgment and hell, a faith founded in persecution and fear, had a field day with an entire generation of teenagers who grew up cowering under desks. Even though it made no sense and provided no real hope, the chaos of the days, the anxiety into which we were born, made it oddly believable. In the 1970s, it seemed important to understand our beginning, and most assuredly we needed to know our end. We wanted to be saved.
And, to me at least, Jesus seemed a better Alpha and Omega than the other options.
* * *
Forty years after I summoned my mother to my bedside, my sister called me while I was in an airport awaiting a flight to Mexico. She said that our mother was critically ill and that I should get to Phoenix as soon as possible. The airline changed my flight to one headed for Arizona. When I arrived, I went immediately to the hospital.
For the next several days, I spent many hours at my mother’s bedside. She was, as the doctors said, “nonresponsive.” There were tubes—lots of them—and the one that enabled her to breathe also kept her from vocalizing. The doctors did not really understand what was wrong, but it seemed she was dying. A nurse told me to talk to her, whatever I thought to do, as there was no real telling what a person comprehended in her state. “There are miracles,” she said. “I’ve seen some surprising things.”
And so I sat and talked and read to her. On Sunday morning of the vigil, neither my brother nor sister was at the hospital. Mom and I were alone. I recited some prayers to her, mostly from the Methodist hymnal, and repeated Psalm 23, creating an impromptu church service, hoping she might recognize some familiar cadences from her own childhood faith. I noticed that her eyes had opened and were a more brilliant blue than I had ever seen. They were not really registering her surroundings, but seeming to search for something, almost as if pleading, a bit agitated perhaps.
Then I realized what I saw in those eyes: fear. She was afraid. Did she know she was dying? Maybe we both feared dying, a fear she never would have revealed to me sitting at my bedside all those years ago. She taught me to be brave the best way she knew, attempting to comfort me by embracing the dark. Now it was my turn to be brave for her.
Not entirely sure what to say or do, I held her hand, looking steadily into the eyes that had beheld me at my birth, eyes that saw me long before I could comprehend the world. And I sang to her. An old Charles Wesley hymn, one every Methodist knows by heart:
Jesus, lover of my soul,
Let me to Thy bosom fly,
While the nearer waters roll,
While the tempest still is high:
Hide me, O my Savior, hide,
Till the storm of life is past;
Safe into the haven guide;
O receive my soul at last.
She seemed to hold my gaze, for a few seconds at least. “I love you, Mom,” I said gently. Maybe she understood, maybe not. Her eyes closed. For a moment I thought she had died.
But she was still breathing, not normally, but breathing. I leaned in close. “Don’t be afraid, Mom.” I whispered. “Your work is done, you can leave if you need to go. Toward Dad. Toward Jesus. Just walk toward the light.”
I kissed her hand, but there was no response. Her breathing calmed.
“Toward the light, Mom,” I repeated, “toward the light.” And then the words came from some deep place of memory: “Let us pray: Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray thee, Lord, my soul to keep.”
It would be easy, I suppose, to imagine this a story of triumph over death, of a victorious Savior who takes the hand of the fearful at life’s end, guiding one into heaven where a mansion awaits. A good death, that thing most Christians hope for. It was not that. Instead, it was just two women, one old and one younger, mother and daughter.
Forty years ago, the older one had spoken of salvation. She urged her daughter to accept the dark, to live well with life as it is, to help others and make the world a better place. That was the way past fear; that was deliverance. She had not used the language of Jesus as Savior, but she had a tough assurance that God was with us here and now and that service and compassion made a difference. She had lived it all.
Holding her hand, I thought of all the people she had helped and loved. Even as she aged and fell ill, she busily gave of the little she had so those with less could live with more. For her, salvation came through baptism and potluck suppers. She longed for joy, yet often walked in sadness. She did her best, and that, I can assure you, was more true for her than for most people I know.
That blueness in her eyes? The brightness I had never seen before? There was fear, yes, but also clarity of a sort. I think she saw more than I can guess. Perhaps she saw the light. We forget that light can be even more terrifying than the dark.
The other woman was, of course, me. I took my turn to be brave at the bedside. “Toward the light, toward Jesus,” I urged. “Don’t be afraid.” As I let her go, I realized that I could let go too. One day I would be in the bed and, God willing, someone would be holding my hand, releasing me toward the light, toward Jesus. Salvation meant understanding that life is, indeed, a circle, where living and dying intertwine, where we help one another live fully now and hold hands while passing into the age to come.
Once I had hoped that Jesus would save me from the fearsome eternity of that passing, but now I know better. At the hospital bed, I was aware that we had both—Mom and me—been delivered, rescued, and made whole, but neither as we expected nor as we might have liked. Yet somehow, Jesus had saved both of us—the one who had repaired our shattered hearts, been with us always, and had somehow inspired courage and resilience. We had seen Jesus in one another’s eyes and witnessed Jesus in the good work we had done with our own hands.
She never taught me about salvation; there was no fancy vocabulary, no born-again experience, no end times rapture. Instead, she had shown me how to live with dignity, persistence, charity, and occasionally joy. For her, salvation was goodness beating back the sin, violence, and injustice of the world, with a kind of quixotic ferocity and always, always, always, trusting that. “Don’t be afraid,” she had urged. “Fear not,” the words of the angel long ago.
Salvation is not really about heaven; it is not an escape. It is about living beyond fear, knowing that death comes for each of us, often in mundane, quiet ways. “It is a characteristic of God to overcome evil with good,” wrote the fourteenth-century mystic Julian of Norwich. “Jesus Christ therefore, who himself overcame evil with good, is our true Mother.”17 Jesus Christ, Savior, our true Mother.
It was the last time we were together. The doctors moved her to hospice shortly thereafter. A few days later, she died as the late morning sun streamed through her window. The nurse said it was very peaceful. I was glad she had not died during the night.