The Good News
Reading Paul beyond justification theory
After two articles on why justification theory leaves churches unable to solve major issues and why salvation by faith degenerates into work, I realized I was leaving some of you guys in the lurch.
It’s not particularly kind to tell people, “Hey, you know that thing we’ve all believed from childhood? It’s a huge problem, right? Anyway, have a great day!” Because many of you, very reasonably, asked, “Well, then how are we saved, Laura?”
Be not afraid, I do not leave you comfortless. After two articles, I do owe you guys some kind of explanation of how I think the gospel in the NT works. Once again, I’m going to be drawing on the book Beyond Justification, which I encourage you to read if you want to see this argument in more detail. You can also take a deep dive into free resources by authors Douglas Campbell and Jon DePue, perhaps starting here.
If you connect with my concerns in the last two articles, you may find the following shotgun-level approach to the letters of Paul (seriously, this is a blindingly fast summary) more helpful.
Summary Points
We know God in God’s self-revelation: Jesus Christ.
Justification theory (JT) maintains that everyone knows the will of God accurately through their consciences, the material world, and written revelation. The problem in JT is that most people deny the truth about God that they know.
However, what Paul says in Galatians 1:11-12 is that he didn’t always have the gospel of Jesus Christ. It was given to him in a revelation. He received it from Jesus.
This indicates that anything we know about God has to comport not with nature or a truth we’re aware of deep within ourselves. It has to comport with Jesus Christ, who Christians confess is God in human flesh. Jesus, who is fully God and fully human, is the fullest and most complete realization we have of what God is like. So what is God like?
God loves you. Seriously.
God is love. God, in the Trinitarian understanding, is three persons - a father, son, and spirit. The three persons love each other and are caught up in a relationship with each other (pg 17). God has always been like this – God was three loving persons before the world existed.
God’s relationship with you is covenantal and unconditional. God’s relationship with you cannot be ended, and his love for you is not conditional.
God’s love worked its way out, into creation and humanity. He made humans. Of course, we know that humans have not done what God wanted them to do, but this has not changed God’s loving disposition towards us. The fullest expression of who God is that humans can grasp – the image of the invisible God, you might say (Col 1:15) – is Jesus. Jesus, as God, is a God who, when you were still a sinner, died for you (Rom 5:8). It was, as Phil 2 tells us, incredibly costly for Jesus to become a human, live humbly among people, and be crucified. And he did all that without you having done anything to convince him to.
Salvation in no way depends on you. It entirely depends on God.
God’s salvation with us does not depend on a contract - that we either do works to earn it, or do something else to activate it. It is a free gift from God. God, having made you and loved you unconditionally, also made a way for you to be free from the things that plague us as humans – namely, sin and death.
You don’t do anything to cause or not cause salvation to happen. You neither earn it nor activate it – not through good works, and not even through a response of faith. Your faith is a response to God’s faithfulness through Jesus – it’s not how you get access to God. You just get it. God did this because God loves you.
So, if you are reading this, take a second to feel happy about the fact that you’re saved. God did it! You weren’t even there when it happened. Thanks, God!
What does that mean?
Salvation is freedom from the enslaving powers of sin and death.
So what exactly does it mean to be saved?
According to Romans 5, Adam, the archetypical first man, brought sin into the world by transgressing against God (Rom 5:12). Sin and death entered the world through him. It’s useful here to think of “sin” as being related to, but distinct from “sins.” For Paul, sin is a power that enslaves humans, not just a collective term for bad things humans do. It controls us, corrupts us, and causes us to do wrong. The extent to which we collaborate with this force obviously varies from person to person, but all of us are captive to it.
God wanted to free us from this. God has elected to be the kind of God who creates a loving family, and doesn’t leave his children in captivity. What kind of parent would God be if he didn’t do this? How God saved us is by sending his divine son Jesus in the flesh. Jesus took on our flesh, which was similarly enslaved to the corrupting forces of sin and death, but lived faithfully on the earth following the will of his Father. He taught, he released people from enslaving forces like illness, and he followed God to death on a cross. Jesus’s faithfulness to God is the secret to how we are saved (Rom 5:18-21).
Christ’s death in his flesh destroyed the enslaving powers of sin and death (Col 2:14-15). All of us are united in “a death like his” – all of us died to these forces when Jesus died (Rom 6:4-7). This death executes the enslaving forces.
But, of course, Jesus did not stay dead. He was raised triumphantly over these enslaving forces (Rom 6:10). And so are we! Being raised with Christ means we are free from those powers. We have been united by the Spirit in a death and resurrection like his. We are free from these forces, belong to God, and are free to live as his children (Rom 8:14-17).
What about faith?
Glad you asked!
Some of you might be saying right now that Galatians says very clearly that we are saved by faith in Jesus Christ, not by all this dying-rising business. Yes, Jesus’s death saved us, but you have to put your faith in Jesus for that to happen.
So for instance, from Gal 2:16 in the ESV:
…a person is not justified by the works of the law, but by faith in Jesus Christ. So we, too, have put our faith in Christ Jesus that we may be justified by faith inChrist and not by the works of the law, because by the works of the law no one will be justified.
Well, that pretty well settles it, doesn’t it?
Not so fast. There’s two things you should know here. First, the word “faith” above is, in Greek, pistis. Pistis can mean “faith,” but it also can mean faithfulness, fidelity, and trust. Those are very different ideas in English, but they’re not in Greek.
The second is that the word “in” in the phrase “faith in Christ” is an interpretive decision. The phrase in Greek is actually more ambiguous – pistis christou. There’s no actual preposition in the Greek phrase; instead it comes from the end of the word christou which is (incoming grammar alert) declined in the genitive case. Genitive usually means something like “of,” and there’s more than one way you can interpret the case based on what makes sense in context.
In this case, the two options that are available to us are the objective genitive, and the subjective genitive. Let’s break it down like this:
The phrase “love of God” can mean two different things. It can be objective, which means that God is the object of the word “love.” In this case, “love of God” would mean the love someone feels for God – ie, my grandmother was well known for her love of God.”
The subjective reading would mean that God is the subject of the love – the love that God feels. “The love of God towards his children is eternal” refers to the love that God feels, not us for God.
So the same thing is true with the “faith/faithfulness of Christ.” Are we saved by faith in Jesus? Or is the faithfulness of Jesus to his Father – dying to defeat sin and flesh and rising again to defeat death – the thing that saves us? Romans 5 suggests it’s actually the latter!
Wait, are you saying that if salvation doesn’t depend on us but only on the faithfulness of Jesus – does that mean everyone is saved?
Kinda seems that way, right?
But what about this passage in the Gospel of Matthew?
You will have to ask Matthew about that. I’m talking about Paul.
But Matthew and Paul are in the same Bible! They have to agree with each other!
I have some terrible news.
So what is the coherent theory of change here? If we are all saved what keeps church abuse from happening?
Adding on to what another commenter posted, I have two questions:
1. If Jesus has already saved everyone, irrespective of works to merit said salvation or even our consent to receive said salvation, then what is the impetus, the motivation, the power that changes us to become conformed to the image of Christ, as Paul states? Not saying we ought to do good IN ORDER to be saved. I also think that's wrong. But I'm curious how you would frame your reasoning for why we ought to be conformed to Christ AKA live as He does and do as He did.
2. If everyone is already saved, how are we to make sense of and view ongoing evil, both out of the church but especially IN the church? Wouldn't this put us back in the same issue as Justification Theory where the wrongdoer is off the hook since, after all, God loves him and already saved him?
3. If everyone is ALREADY saved, how, if at all possible, do people end up not in eternal relationship with Christ, as many NT authors explicitly and implicitly suggest? If God saves us all and will eventually bring us with Him into the "new heaven and new earth" apart from ANYTHING we do, is not this just Calvinist predestination all over again with some universalism sprinkled in? God ends up not respecting our freedom?