Participating in Abundant Life

Holistic Salvation for a Secular Age

Mark R. Teasdale, Mark Teasdale

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781514000526
• eBook ISBN: 9781514000533
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

Our world is hungry for salvation, but we don't always know how to talk about it. Christians agree that God cares about people's lives both in this world and into eternity. But the ways we describe salvation often separate the spiritual from the material. Many groups emphasize one at the expense of the other, limiting the picture of what God has to offer.Mark Teasdale works to bridge the gaps by taking up Jesus' language of abundant life. This life is something Jesus invites us to participate in—to seek both for ourselves and for others. It's rich and multidimensional, not splitting spirits and minds from bodies and material needs. By connecting biblical perspectives of holistic salvation to contemporary concepts of well-being, Teasdale also shows how Christians can both better communicate in secular settings as well as partner with all people regardless of their faith to seek the common good.Incorporating concepts of material standard of living and subjective quality of life, Teasdale argues, gives Christians common language to share the promise of abundant life with those who hold to secular commitments. Yet we must also boldly present Jesus' invitation to eternal life and discipleship. For churches, ministry leaders, and laypeople Teasdale offers ideas to improve and measure methods of promoting all dimensions of salvation for the good of others.

1

A Mission for the Common Good

SINCE I BEGAN TEACHING EVANGELISM over a decade ago, I have pushed my students to explain their “starting point.”1 Their starting point is the good thing God has done in their lives through Jesus Christ that they want others to experience. This is an alternative to popular conceptions of evangelism, which are grounded in preparing for judgment (rather than being invited into God’s goodness) and are rehearsed as a pat set of propositional statements Christians have memorized about God’s love (rather than being shared out of the Christian’s personal experience of God’s grace).

Once my students can articulate their respective starting points, they need to expand on them. Instead of just seeing their experiences as one-off moments or feelings, they need to use them as the basis for explaining the nature of God and how God interacts with the world. Who is the God that brings about the kind of goodness they experienced? What activities does this God engage in? How does this God want us to respond to this goodness? The starting point becomes the foundation for making sense of their individual life stories and, more broadly, for developing a metanarrative that makes sense of how God operates in the universe.2

This metanarrative stretches across time. It tells the story of how God has worked to bring goodness in the past, how God is sustaining goodness in the present, and how the student anticipates with hope the goodness God will bring in the future, even into eternity. This story provides the motivation for the students’ life choices and ministries. It also is something they want others to know and claim so they can enjoy the goodness God offers.

It is at the point of shifting from their personal experiences to a metanarrative that my students often stumble. They understand the need to articulate their authentic experience of God’s goodness through Jesus, but they have trouble seeing how this launches them to a grander view of the goodness that God wants all people to experience. They struggle to articulate how God’s actions in the past and present lead to a vision for God’s purposes in the future.

My students are not alone. Many Christians have trouble explaining this. As an evangelism professor, I often run across this. A recent email from a pastor asking me to develop a training program stated this explicitly. When I asked him whether he wanted me to focus more on evangelistic theology or evangelistic practices, he replied,

I’m asking for even one step further back. As the pastor here, I am very concerned that even our leaders and staff can’t articulate faith succinctly or confidently. We have some of the best people in the world here at [First Church], but we aren’t at all confident at faith sharing. We can run meetings, we can set agendas, we can be good citizens, we are great at serving in various ways, but if someone asks even our leaders and staff to share about their faith, there is fear and trepidation showing in our eyes.

This pastor’s plea catches the Zeitgeist of many congregations in the West today. We know how to do good things. We know we should do them in Jesus’ name. We know we have hope for eternity. We don’t know how to fit all these pieces together; much less do we have a coherent explanation for why they ought to fit together. As Alan Hirsch and Mark Nelson astutely observed in their book Reframation: “We have lost a sense of the big story that makes sense of all our little stories.”3

REINTRODUCING SALVATION

The Christian concept that expresses how God works to overcome all harm and bring goodness to creation is salvation. This makes the concept of salvation indispensable to sharing our faith since it explains both the dangers God desires to save us from and the goodness God desires to grant us. It plants a flag in the ground that declares unequivocally that Christians believe God is good and that God works to share that goodness with all people. As clear as this seems to be, I am convinced that it is a lack of clarity about what we believe salvation is that has brought Christians to this discomfort in sharing their faith.

Even though the word salvation is ubiquitous in Christian teaching, it is often left undefined. The result is for Christians to have this centerpiece of their faith shrink in importance and scope. It becomes reduced to an agenda that is more defined by cultural or countercultural logic than by the gospel, often made synonymous with concepts such as justice, equality, or soul-saving. Outside of this, it is a vague hope that may provide solace at a funeral but has little impact on daily life.

Compounding this lack of clarity is that Christians in the West live in a secular culture. Per Charles Taylor’s work, this is a culture that sets up an “immanent frame”4 which disallows any consideration of the supernatural, much less of the full Christian gospel. Being motivated by profit, power, or other earthly desires may be crass, but at least it makes sense since these are goals that the secular culture recognizes. Being motivated by the desire for people to enter the goodness of an invisible deity is not. So, we either make our belief in God vague and private to avoid having it interfere with our daily interactions with others, or we adopt a logic for salvation that fits within preexisting agendas for improving the world, convincing ourselves the parts of the gospel that are outside those agendas are anachronistic, unnecessary, or simply wrong.

There is another way, a way that provides a more holistic vision of the goodness God desires to provide through salvation and that moves Christians away from their reduced understandings of it. It is an understanding that presents salvation as something to be experienced in an ongoing way. We are not saved just once, but we enter a continuous process of receiving and sharing God’s goodness, even working alongside other people of goodwill as witnesses for Christ. This is participating in abundant life.

SALVATION AS PARTICIPATING IN ABUNDANT LIFE

The term abundant life comes from John 10:10, when Jesus is speaking to the Pharisees about the way that the Good Shepherd approaches his sheep. The Good Shepherd enters the sheep pen through the door, demonstrating that he is the natural and rightful caretaker of the sheep. This contrasts to those who break into the pen. These people are thieves who only harm the sheep. Applying the metaphor of the Good Shepherd to himself and the metaphor of the thief to false teachers, Jesus states, “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly” (NRSV).

According to Jesus, the Good Shepherd comes to bring abundant life to the sheep. Following this metaphor, participating in abundant life involves two things for the sheep: being cared for by the Good Shepherd and joining the Good Shepherd in caring for others.

The Good Shepherd cares for the needs of the sheep. This includes attending to the physical and social needs of the sheep. The shepherd provides them a safe place to stay, sufficient pasture and water, and even the company of each other. The shepherd himself keeps the sheep company as seen later in the passage, when Jesus says that the sheep know his voice, suggesting that the shepherd is present with the sheep and talks with them (John 10:27).

This is not all. After introducing the term abundant life, Jesus refers to his coming death (John 10:11-15). He explains that, as the Good Shepherd, he must protect his sheep from the wolf that desires to destroy them. He will do this by allowing the wolf to kill him in place of the sheep. In saying this, Jesus avers that the abundant life he offers is not restricted to caring for physical needs but involves providing something that only his death could make possible. According to traditional Christian teaching, it is through his death that God provides forgiveness for sin and entrance into eternal glory. Jesus makes this eternal aspect of abundant life plain in the same passage when he states, “I give them eternal life, and they will never perish. No one will snatch them out of my hand” (John 10:28 NRSV).

Jesus is pleased to provide this abundant life to all people, just as the Good Shepherd provides it to all the sheep. Jesus is so desirous to share this abundant life with everyone that, if we borrow a passage from the Gospel of Luke, he even seeks the lost to share it with them (Luke 15:3-7). However, Jesus does not just call people to receive life. They are to join him in sharing this life with others.

A shepherd does not care for sheep just because he enjoys doing it. The shepherd cares for sheep with the expectation that the sheep will share their gifts. They will be sheared, providing wool for clothing, blankets, and other necessities. They will give milk that can nourish others. Some may even give their lives to provide meat for hungry people to eat. Notably, the sheep do nothing to earn these gifts. They simply receive them as the shepherd makes life possible for them. They then give the gifts at the time the shepherd decides.

Likewise, Jesus expects that people will share the gifts they have received from God with others, especially those who are in need. The difference is that people have far more gifts they can share than sheep have. They might provide financial assistance for the poor, food for the hungry, community for the lonely, encouragement for the brokenhearted, and the gospel message for sinners ready to repent and find eternal life. In doing this, people become more than just recipients of abundant life whom Jesus saves from harm in this world and the next; they become participants in abundant life. They allow the life they receive from Jesus to shine through them as they reach out with their gifts so that others might live more fully.

Participating in abundant life allows us to live into the entire narrative of God’s salvific work in our lives. We celebrate that God did save us through Christ in the past. We look forward expectantly to the glory God will welcome us into in the future. We participate in receiving God’s provision and sharing it with others in the present. We also recognize that the salvation God provides us includes caring for people in both this world and the next through the life and death of Jesus Christ. All of this has direct implications for our evangelistic witness because it calls on those of us who enjoy God’s life-giving provisions to make this fullness of life available to others. The abundant life we experience through Jesus is both holistic and missional.

ABUNDANT LIFE AND THE COMMON GOOD

The idea of participating in abundant life does more than offer an expanded understanding of salvation. It also provides Christians an attractive way to express their faith within a secular context. In For the Life of the World, Miroslav Volf and Matthew Croasmun give two reasons for this. First, our notion of human flourishing identifies what kind of life we believe is worth living.5 In this case, we are claiming our lives flourish best when we participate in abundant life by receiving and sharing God’s goodness with others. Second, every culture recognizes the need to have a vision of the good to order people’s lives.6 Whether our culture is secular or not, all people are seeking for a meaningful way to live. Apart from our ability to articulate our understanding of the abundant life God offers us now and into the future, along with its call to care for others, we fail to have a message that meets this existential need.

But we do have such a message, and it is compelling. While Jesus is clear that only those who follow him will inherit eternal life, he is equally clear that God sustains the lives of all people regardless of their belief or even morality. In the Sermon on the Mount he explains that God “makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous” (Matthew 5:45 NRSV). This is not the fullness of abundant life, but it still is an act of common grace and is exceptionally generous. God provides vast resources to sustain the physical lives of everyone on earth.

Despite this generosity, through sin, injustice, and tragedy, many people find themselves in need. Jesus makes it clear that those who follow him are to care for these people. As we explore later, he even shares that the eternal salvation of those who have much is dependent on whether they share with those who have little.

Part of what makes this message compelling is that the idea of caring for the needs of others entails working for the common good. This is not uniquely Christian. Those who argue that all religions seem like they are the same often point to the common ethic of caring for others that most religions, as well as people who are secular, teach. We can all agree that we should feed the hungry, clothe the naked, heal the sick, visit the lonely, and work for justice. And, in fact, people of goodwill who have sufficient resources do commit to these activities regardless of their faith tradition or lack thereof.

Rather than be concerned that acknowledging this broad human commitment to care for others dilutes the Christian message, Christians should welcome it. It demonstrates that the Spirit of God is alive and well, prompting all people at least partially to participate in abundant life. They are receiving some of God’s abundant life through the provisions that sustain them in this world, and they are inspired to share these gifts with others.

This common commitment to care for others gives Christians a platform from which to share the gospel message more fully. Christians, no less than anyone else, seek to work for the common good. We agree with all those who commit themselves to saving people from hunger, destitution, pain, disease, and the other maladies that afflict creation, and we can work beside them toward this noble end. As we do this, we will gain credibility to share with them that we believe what we are doing is part of how we experience salvation: partic...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword by Alan Hirsch and Mark Nelson
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 A Mission for the Common Good
• 2 Experiencing Salvation
• 3 Saving Lives
• 4 Standard of Living
• 5 Saving Happiness
• 6 Eternal Life
• 7 Salvation Today
• Appendix: Metrics for Salvation
• Notes
• General Index
• Scripture Index
• Praise for Participating in Abundant Life
• About the Author
• Also by Mark R. Teasdale
• More Titles from InterVarsity Press
• Copyright