Salvation in Fresh Perspective

Covenant, Cross, and Kingdom

Matthew I. Ayars

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781498201827
• eBook ISBN:
  9781498201834
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

Mainstream Christianity tends to define salvation exclusively in terms of substitutionary atonement (Jesus died for me so that I can go to heaven when I die). While this is not incorrect, nor unbiblical, this definition of salvation is incomplete. Where does Israel fit into salvation? And what about the covenant? Most importantly, what about the kingdom of God that Jesus preached fervently? How do all of these dimensions that are central to the biblical text and its message fit into the bigger picture of salvation? Salvation in Fresh Perspective: Covenant, Cross, and Kingdom reminds readers that salvation is not centrally about the believer, but about God and his World Renewal Plan. Salvation, when properly framed by the entire text that runs from Genesis to Revelation, is not all about me and Jesus, but about God and his plan to renew the creation through the Jewish Messiah and his covenant people. Salvation in Fresh Perspective seeks to bring back into focus the often forgotten dimensions of the great story of salvation.

Part 1

God’s World Renewal Plan

1

The Salvation Narrative

God’s Story

The treatment of salvation in Exodus is all the more powerful because it is told in the context of narrative. Mahatma Gandhi reportedly told his friend, American missionary E. Stanley Jones, that he did not believe the Bible was divine because it was composed largely of stories. Apparently, he thought that divine revelation should take the form of bare, contextless pronouncements, as the Koran or many of the Hindu books do. But we believe the Bible is divinely inspired, not in spite of large sections in narrative form, but precisely because it appears in such a form.

—John Oswalt9

I recently encountered a well-intentioned Christian brother sporting a bright orange T-shirt. The shirt had a graphic borrowed from the popular board game Monopoly. The graphic was a Chance card that said in bold font, “Get Out of Hell Free.” This, for far too many Christians, sums up Jesus, the cross, and the resurrection. Believe in Jesus and you’ll be issued a “Get Out of Hell Free” card. Really? Is it really that one-dimensional? Does this sum up the sixty-six books of Scripture, the promises to Abraham, Israel, David, the disciples and the church today? Is this what it’s all about?

To borrow the phrase that Paul repeats again and again in Romans, “By no means!” (Rom 3:4, 6, 3; 6:2, 15; 7:7, 13; 9:14; 11:1, 11). How have we ended up in a place where our theology warrants propagating the Gospel of Jesus Christ as being synonymous with a “Get Out of Hell Free” card? I’m sure the answers are many, but the bottom line, I believe, is that we have tragically lost sight of the salvation narrative. This is what Sandra Richter means when she says, “most Christians have not been taught that the story of the Old Testament is their story . . . The church does not know who she is, because she does not know who she was.”10 Thankfully, Paul did not make this mistake. It is when we read Paul (as well as the entire New Testament) without the Old Testament in sight that we end up with bad theology T-shirts (and bumper stickers).

The church must remember who she was. This means recognizing that salvation is not centrally about me-and-my-sin-crisis, it is about Jesus and God’s World Renewal Plan. N. T. Wright says, “The theological equivalent of supposing that the sun goes round the earth is the belief that the whole of Christian truth is all about me and my salvation.”11 We have to remember that the New Testament authors were interpreters of the Old Testament and understood their stories to be intimately connected with that of the Old Testament.

Not only must we have knowledge of the characters, events, and places of the Old Testament, but we must also have an integrated view of the Old Testament, its message and its theology. We must be able to go beyond knowledge of what the Old Testament says to arrive at a place where we know what the Old Testament means. We must broaden our lens so as to see the whole picture of the Old Testament in order to understand how the New Testament links up with it, and how the history of God carrying out his single plan to redeem creation takes shape throughout.

We get into interpretive trouble when we forget that in reading Scripture we are dealing with a single story that runs through all of Scripture. It is when we separate ourselves from this history, from our heritage, that we end up with an understanding of holiness and salvation that knows only of me-and-my-sin-crisis and going to heaven. God forbid!

The gospel, the full gospel, is much deeper, richer, and more profound than this. It is about so much more than where we spend life after death—it’s about so much more than God alleviating me of my sin-guilt so that I can go on living a happy and peaceful life in communion with God. This is merely a part of the story. The full gospel is a complex thing that cannot, and should not, be flattened out or deflated by removing or neglecting the story of God’s faithful plan to redeem all of the creation through his chosen people. The full gospel is a far cry from being summarized in a “Get Out of Hell Free” card.

When we lose the complex backdrop of God’s World Renewal Plan while reading the New Testament and interpreting God’s salvation into our daily lives, it will greatly impact the way we think about salvation. From the perspective of me-and-my-sin-crisis, salvation becomes something that’s primarily about me. Salvation certainly concerns the individual, but when we read the story of Scripture properly, we begin to see that my salvation is for a purpose that goes beyond my peace of heart and mind. We can be moved by the idea of a perfected will and fully devoted heart, but we must not end there. God forbid! We will see that salvation, and holiness in particular, is something very missional. When we get this piece right we then begin to move into embracing and understanding the full gospel.

So what is the full gospel? The full gospel can only be properly placed in perspective when read as a story. The full gospel is the metanarrative of Scripture. Now we turn to define what we mean by the “metanarrative of Scripture.”

Defining Salvation Narrative: God’s World Renewal Plan

In a phrase, the salvation narrative is the story of God’s single plan to rescue the creation from the oppression of sin and death by reestablishing his righteous governance (the kingdom of God) over creation through his chosen human agents. What we are talking about is God’s World Renewal Plan—the coming of the kingdom of God on earth as it is in heaven. We are talking about God’s plan to rescue the creation from its condemnation, corruption, and decay, which are the consequences of human disobedience and moral autonomy.12 This Plan is multifaceted, and its various dimensions are integrated and have overlapping layers. We will see this as we progress through God’s World Renewal Plan as the crucial framework for understanding salvation.

This single mission to the world through Israel is precisely what shapes New Testament theology. What we’re talking about is monotheistic covenant theology. The New Testament understands the death and resurrection of the Messiah strictly through the lens of God’s covenant with Israel, reaching clear back to Genesis. The new covenant that is launched with the death and resurrection of Jesus is a continuation of God’s greater Plan. This is true in much the same way that the Mosaic covenant established at Sinai is continuation and fulfillment of the covenant God made with Abraham in Genesis 15. Thinking about Sinai without Abraham would be a mistake. Such a mistake would lead to misinterpreting the theological and historical implications of what happened at Sinai. Moses and Abraham are characters in the same, continuous story. Abraham’s story prepares for Moses’ story, which prepares for Israel’s story, which prepares for Jesus’ story, which prepares for the church’s story.

Further still, reading the prophets without Sinai in view would be, for the same reason, a major interpretive fallacy. Without being mindful of the covenant and its stipulations established at Sinai, we would be entirely unable to understand the basis of God’s judgment and hope pronounced through the prophets.

All this to say that there is only one proper way of framing our thoughts about the kingdom of God and the new covenant that Jesus preached and taught, and that is around God’s World Renewal Plan. This is precisely why we can’t read Paul without hearing about Abraham, Israel, and even Adam. This is also why we can’t read the Gospels without reference to the kingdom, the Messiah (Christ), the Son of Man, and David (we will unpack this further in later chapters).

The idea here is that the Bible is a single salvation narrative of God’s World Renewal Plan that begins in Genesis and ends in Revelation. Paul was an excellent interpreter of Scripture because he properly took into account salvation history. As a first-century Jew with a vocation to expand the kingdom among Gentiles, it was the only way he could interpret Jesus, the cross, the resurrection, and Pentecost. Paul’s calling to preach the gospel among the Gentiles is seated in the context of the coming of a new age situated in the greater timeline of God’s redemptive plan (i.e., Jewish covenant eschatology). This all-encompassing lens is what makes Paul’s theology so multifaceted (and often times hard to understand). Paul’s thought and theology properly accounted for salvation history, the Roman Empire, the Jews, and most importantly Jesus, as characters in an epic drama that began all the way back in Genesis. Each of these key players had their specific place within the fulfillment of God’s promises to Israel and to the world for renewal.

This means that the story of Jesus, the cross, and the resurrection is not a new story. N. T. Wright speaks to this by saying:

The “reinterpretation” or “reworking” in which Paul engaged was seen by him not as a new, quirky or daring thing to do with ancient traditions, but as the true meaning of those ancient traditions, which had either gone unnoticed or been distorted by more recent readings of Israel’s Scriptures and the movements of life and culture in which those readings played a key part.13

The story of Jesus, the story of Adam and Eve, Abraham, Moses, Israel, David, Nehemiah, and Isaiah the prophet are all the same story, and Paul read it that way. He understood salvation and holiness in light of the people, places, and events of the greater story.

As is reflected in bumper-sticker theology, this concept is far removed from the thought life of t...

Table of contents

• 00.Front.Matter
• 01.Chapters
• 01-1.Chapters
• 01-2.Chapters
• 01-3.Chapters
• 01-4.Chapters
• 01-5.Chapters
• 01-6.Chapters
• 01-7.Chapters
• 01-8.Chapters
• 02.Bibliography
• 02-1.Bibliography
• 03.Index