The Breadth of Salvation

Rediscovering the Fullness of God's Saving Work

Tom Greggs

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781540961952
• eBook ISBN:
  9781493423897
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

All too often, the Christian understanding of salvation has been one-dimensional, reducing all that God has done for us to a single conception or idea. Tom Greggs, one of today's leading theologians, offers a brief, accessibly written, but theologically substantive treatment of the doctrine of salvation. Drawing on the broad tradition of the church and the Christian faith in explaining the Christian understandings of salvation, Greggs challenges the contemporary church to be captured afresh by the immeasurable height, depth, and breadth of God's saving actions.

1
The Breadth of the Cross

In Liverpool, where I come from originally, there is a restaurant which might sound disgusting but which I love. It is a hot buffet restaurant which serves all kinds of foods—Indian, Chinese, Thai, Italian, British, Mexican, barbecue. Whenever I go, I always feel somewhat disappointed by how boring so many of the other diners are. Some have a little bit of lasagna and a couple of pieces of garlic bread and a salad with Italian dressing. Some are eating just one variety of curry with rice and naan. But this place is a buffet! Its joy is the wide variety of food on offer all at the same time. It is not a place to hold back but a place to feast. And so I like to mix it up a bit: Italian starters, Thai mains, maybe with a couple of sides of Indian food. And there’s always space for a few spring rolls, isn’t there? After all, what’s the point of a buffet like this in its feast-like proportions if you don’t feast and feast on, savoring and delighting in all of the variety?

When it comes to the events of saving grace which Scripture records, so often we’re like those boring people who can only focus on one thing—who only have one sort of food or one dish at a buffet. We talk about sacrifice, or redemption, or substitution, or atonement, or love, or satisfaction, as if only one image were available, only one understanding were possible. Better, it seems, to be like me at a buffet—and taste everything you possibly can: to feast on God’s salvation in Jesus Christ. Why? Because the salvation achieved in Jesus Christ, the richness of the events of his life, passion, and resurrection, offers us a feast for our fallen humanity, which—when it is explored in its depths—teaches us what it means to have the deposit of salvation through the Holy Spirit today. There is a breadth of imagery in the story of salvation, and we should feast on that breadth. Scripture is not a textbook with a formula in it that reduces everything to some great equation in the sky. Scripture is the record of God’s saving grace through Jesus Christ—in anticipation in the Old Testament and in recollection in the New.

As a systematic theologian, but most of all as a Christian preacher and as a churchman, I can think of no topic that is more important than the good news of Jesus Christ and of the loving and merciful grace that is the divine origins and ends of his life, death, resurrection, ascension, and return, which is known to us in faith through the self-giving of his Holy Spirit. But we so frequently confuse the person of Jesus Christ and all Christ achieves with our understandings of how salvation took place. As Christians, we should never forget that it is not our understanding of salvation which saves us but the Savior himself. He is the good news. He is the one we are to proclaim. He is our origin and our end, the Alpha and the Omega.

Salvation in Christ, Not in Models of Christ’s Atonement

Despite the magnitude of this most important message of all time, so often within the church we have reduced the captivating, powerful, life-changing, history-shaping reality of the salvific work of the God of the gospel to reductive, overly conceptualized, semi-contractual, self-limiting models (interpretations and understandings) of the atonement. And we espouse our favorite of these as if there were only one, and—worse still—as if the model itself and not Jesus Christ in his self-sacrificial life, death, resurrection, and ascension is the basis of salvation.

What do I mean by this? I mean that when we try to explain and describe the saving work of God, that work of description never takes the place of the God who saves in Jesus Christ by the Spirit. Our accounts of salvation are our best attempts at understanding all that God has done for us. They offer us aids and assistance with which to understand something of the breadth and plenitude of the narrative of God’s salvation. But sometimes we have considered these explanations, descriptions, and reflections (the models of the atonement) and our knowledge of them salvific. We have failed to see that they are not salvific; all they do is point to Christ, who is the Savior. And at times we have used these models as a badge of our Christianity (or our authentic kind of Christianity), claiming that only we (and those who agree with us) have the right knowledge of how salvation works, and therefore we alone are saved.

So we talk sometimes as if substitutionary atonement as a concept, or satisfaction as a model, or participation in Christ as a theological formula were the saving thing. But they are not. Salvation comes from Jesus Christ himself in obedience to the Father’s saving will and known to us through the Holy Spirit’s saving presence in our lives. All that these reflections and models do is to try to understand that reality more deeply and to grasp components and aspects of Scripture in what it tells us about our salvation. Furthermore, when we place so much emphasis on the one model or understanding of salvation we like and look to, we limit the breadth of the images and models of salvation God offers us in Scripture and the capacity these have variously to capture our theological imaginations. And even then, with our focus on our preferred model, we limit so often what we think the effects of salvation are—accounting only for the activity of God in putting us right with Godself, not considering the breadth of what God does, and failing to attend to the simultaneous restoration of our relationships on the horizontal plane both within the church and within the world. And still, it seems to me, we operate with our judgments about salvation as if we were those who judge between the sheep and the goats, as if we were able to see as God sees—to see the heart. We limit the breadth of God’s salvific reach and its inherent surprises to those who are like us, enacting that unholy puritanical judgmentalism that says, “Only me and thee are saved, and I am not so sure about thee.” And how we identify those who might be saved is through identifying a response to faith similar to our own. Only those who have repented in a certain way, or prayed the Jesus prayer, or are able to narrate the exact moment of conversion, or can speak of the sacramental journey through baptism and confirmation—only those who accord to our own mode of response to salvation—are those whom we see as authentic beneficiaries of all that God has done in saving grace.

Now, before people get overly anxious about what on earth it is that I am saying, let me be clear about what I am not saying. I am not saying that interpretations and models of the atonement are unhelpful or unnecessary. I am not saying there might not be some understandings and models that more helpfully indicate the narrative of Scripture than do others, or that it might not be through a particular one that we view the others. I am not saying that salvation does not concern the reconciliation of God and humanity in the person and work of Jesus Christ (quite the contrary!). I am not saying that faith in the gospel is unimportant or that a response to God’s grace is not profoundly important. And I am most firmly not saying that some unlovely principle of universality can be applied in any kind of way that undermines the urgency of the gospel and the reality of divine judgment.

What I am saying is this: salvation is only in Christ, only through grace, only by faith (solus Christus, sola gratia, sola fidei, as the Reformers would have it). We must put the person of Christ and the grace of the God of the gospel and the beautiful breadth of Scripture’s account of this grace which we know in faith back at the heart of our accounts of salvation. We do well to broaden our minds to the vast horizons of salvation of that particular life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Christ for creation. So, rather than reducing our accounts of Christ’s salvific life and work to some essence captured in an overly formulized and one-dimensional model, interpretation, understanding, or concept, in all our speech about salvation we must point back to and describe the contours of the saving life, work, and person of the Savior Jesus Christ, through whom alone salvation comes. We need to be open to Scripture’s richness and breadth. We need to put the Saving One right at the heart of our accounts of salvation.

And this will interrupt us and wake us from our lazy and narrow views of the God of the gospel. Indeed, any discussion of salvation that we undertake should seek to proclaim the interruptive event of God’s reconciling grace in Jesus Christ—an event that continues to interrupt us, raise us from our comfort, even in the life of faith. At the center of our understanding should be the Christ who is known by the Spirit—the human life, death, and resurrection of the person who is perfectly obedient to the Father and who, as the incarnate God-human, mediates God’s grace perfectly to humanity. All too often, our attempts at describing and understanding the concrete drama of God’s reconciling grace fall prey to a mechanized overconceptualization, such that the human Jesus is eclipsed. The life and humanity and narrative of Jesus known in the Gospels is subsumed to some kind of conceptual framework. This understanding moves beyond the level of description to the point where the understanding itself is considered to save. So, we are saved by substitutionary atonement, or by the satisfaction of God’s honor, or by justification, or by the victory of redemption. To this kind of understanding we must say: No! We are saved by the God of salvation, the God of the gospel, the God who is known to us supremely in Jesus Christ by the Spirit. Jesus Christ is not the outworking of some understanding or model of salvation: Jesus Christ is our salvation! All that models or interpretations can do is to point to him. He is not an illustration of them; they are an illustration of him.

The focus on single models and understandings of salvation with such heightened importance runs deeply contrary to classical, creedal Christianity. Technically speaking, there is no dogma (no absolute, agreed theological statement by the church) of the atonement as there is of the Trinity or of the person of Jesus Christ. The ecumenical councils never settled—nor found it necessary to consider—which model or understanding of the atonement was the model or the understanding to which all Christians should adhere. Instead, the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed (of 381) narrates the broad contours of the life of Jesus (the salvific events of his life) in the context of the gracious incarnating of God’s Son in creation:

For us and for our salvation

he came down from heaven:

by the power of the Holy Spirit

he became incarnate from the Virgin Mary,

and was made man.

For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate;

he suffered death and was buried.

On the third day he rose again

in accordance with the Scriptures;

he ascended into heaven

and is seated at the right hand of the Father.

He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead,

and his kingdom will have no end.1

The Council of Chalcedon (in 451) added greater reflection on the dogma of Christ’s person: Jesus Christ is one person (Jesus Christ) in two natures (God and human)—the hypostatic union of God and humanity in the one person Jesus Christ. Chalcedon, like the previous councils, also states that the Son of God’s becoming human is “for our salvation.” But it never enshrined a conceptual model in relation to the work of salvation. What am I saying in pointing to this? I am saying this: when we confuse the effect of the saving events of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection with adherence to a particular conceptual model, interpretation, or understanding as a shibboleth that ensures our salvation, we not only part company with classical, creedal Christianity; we eclipse Jesus himself, the acknowledgment of whose lordship and resurrection brings to us the benefits of the reconciliation of creation which he brought about through his incarnation, life, death, resurrection, and ascension. But does this mean that interpretations and understandings of salvation have no place? Does it mean we do not need to love God with our minds when we meditate on God’s saving grace? Not at all.

So What Do Theologies of the Atonement Do?

The very best interpretations and understandings of the atonement are those which effectively paraphrase the atoning life and work of Christ, known to us in Scripture, and point us back to the biblical text and its language and—crucially—to the interruptive encounter with the one about whom that language is concerned. In short, the very best accounts of salvation make plain through their focus on Scripture that salvation comes only in and through Christ.

John Calvin’s great theological work, Institutes of the Christian Religion, does just this. In book 2, paragraph 16, Calvin, with light but profound conceptuality, follows through the narrative arc of the creed, using this as the means to reflect on the biblical account of the saving life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus. In chapter 17, there is a more conceptual set of reflections around the concept of substitutionary atonement and Christ as the price of human redemption (see below), but again with a profound sense of the testimony of Scripture to the saving life and acts of Jesus Christ. Indeed, for all of the seemingly speculative and abstract nature of the discussion, even Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae follows a similar pattern, structuring the reflections on the shape of the creed and the gospel narrative of the death, resurrection, and ascension of Christ (see III.46–59). These are two of the greatest, most famous, most influential theologians ever to live, and they realized this: theologies of salvation are at their best when they lead us back to the Saving One. They are at their best not when they are overmechanized and overconceptualized but when they follow the pattern of the creed and the gospel—that is, the pattern of the life of Jesus—and point to him. Beyond that, they help to accent the various accounts and images of the life and work of Jesus in Scripture.

We live today in an age in which it seems like two options are available with regard to the broader public outside the church (and, worryingly, sometimes within the church) in relation to the cross. On the one hand, there is the sense in which we have inoculated ourselves to the reality of the event of the cross. We have taken away from it the scandalizing and shocking nature of the story (1 Cor. 1:23). We have turned the cross instead into an item of decorative jewelry, or we have covered the cross with flowers as I have seen repeatedly in churches of late (with no story of the narrative of getting to that point). I am sure we have all heard stories of people going into jewelry shops and asking for a cross, only to be presented with one to which the shopper (who really wanted a crucifix and not a cross) replies, “No, I didn’t want one like that. I wanted one with a little man on it.” We have lost all sense of the story of the crucifixion—of the costly reality of all that God has done for us.

But equally, on the other hand, we focus so much on the brutality of the cross that we psychologize the brutal and torturous punishment. We do this to such a degree that we focus not on the good news of salvation but on the pain of the event in a guilt-inducing reflection which turns us away from saving grace and back on ourselves, our sin, and our guilt. We see this in everything from certain medieval, mystical meditations on the blood of Christ to nineteenth-century pietistic hymns and their focus on the blood. In popular culture, Mel Gibson’s film The Passion of the Christ, with...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. The Breadth of the Cross
• 2. The Breadth of Salvation in the Society of God
• 3. The Breadth of Grace for the World
• 4. The Breadth of Repentance
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Index
• Back Cover