The God Who Saves

A Dogmatic Sketch

Congdon

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781532608490
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Christian universalism has been explored in its biblical, philosophical, and historical dimensions. For the first time, The God Who Saves explores it in systematic theological perspective. In doing so it also offers a fresh take on universal salvation, one that is postmetaphysical, existential, and hermeneutically critical. The result is a constructive account of soteriology that does justice to both the universal scope of divine grace and the historicity of human existence.In The God Who Saves David W. Congdon orients theology systematically around the New Testament witness to the apocalyptic inbreaking of God's reign. The result is a consistently soteriocentric theology. Building on the insights of Rudolf Bultmann, Ernst Kasemann, Eberhard Jungel, and J. Louis Martyn, he interprets the saving act of God as the eschatological event that crucifies the old cosmos in Christ. Human beings participate in salvation through their unconscious, existential cocrucifixion, in which each person is interrupted by God and placed outside of himself or herself.Both academically rigorous and pastorally sensitive, The God Who Saves opens up new possibilities for understanding not only what salvation is but also who the God who brings about our salvation is. Here is an interdisciplinary exercise in dogmatic theology for the twenty-first century.

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Introduction

The Problem of Christian Universalism

And now, O Lord, what do I wait for? My hope is in you.

Psalm 39:7

Dare We Hope? Can We Know?

For what may we hope? The question is not just an eschatological addendum. It is the primal question of faith, the “burning bush” at the center of Christian existence (R. S. Thomas). The question, when asked by faith, does not concern what will happen in the chronological future, but rather who we are in the eschatological now. Can we live—right now—as creatures of hope? This is the question of our identity and mission in light of our true end (telos) as constituted and revealed in Jesus Christ through his Spirit. In asking it here, we thus mean something very different from Immanuel Kant’s asking of the same question in his third Critique. Theological eschatology is qualitatively different from philosophical teleology. And this is because eschatology is wholly and simultaneously a matter of soteriology, christology, and the doctrine of God. In other words, it is not merely one part of a larger system of doctrine; it is instead the heart of the Christian life. As Karl Barth famously put it, “Christianity that is not completely and utterly eschatology has completely and utterly nothing to do with Christ.”1

Today, however, the recognition of the centrality of eschatological hope is insufficient. We hear about “hope” everywhere we go. What ought to be a decisive word of divine grace and new possibilities too often seems to be a way of skirting the radical implications of God’s revelation in Christ. The confidence that belongs to the hope of faith is often confused with the ambivalence that belongs to merely worldly hope. The Psalmist declares, “And now, O Lord, what do I wait for? My hope is in you” (Ps 39:7). How different this is from the trivial remarks we hear every day: “I hope I get a new bike for my birthday” or “I hope I get chosen for this new position at work.” Even theologians often speak about eschatological hope in a way that sounds more like one’s hope for a new bike than the Psalmist’s paradoxically confident and certain hope in the loving-kindness of God. In his response to T. F. Torrance’s claim that “at the very best universalism could only be concerned with a hope, with a possibility,”2 John A. T. Robinson remains profoundly correct in his judgment that to speak about eschatological “possibilities” may sound humble but “is in fact that most subtly unbiblical. For the New Testament never says that God may be all in all, that Christ may draw all men unto himself, but that he will. And to assert that he will is not human dogmatism, but to hold fast to the fundamental declaration of the gospel of the effective election of all men in Christ.”3 To ask with Hans Urs von Balthasar, “Dare we hope that all will be saved?”4 does not preclude asking, “Can we know that all will be saved?” To affirm the former’s hope does not compete with the latter’s certainty. If it is truly Christian hope, then such confidence is not only possible but in fact necessary. Anything less would contradict the faith attested by Paul before Agrippa: “I stand here on trial on account of my hope in the promise made by God to our ancestors” (Acts 26:6; emphasis mine). Christian faith is confident hope in the effective promise of God.

The purpose of this book is to develop a Christian dogmatics in light of the universality of God’s saving grace in Jesus Christ. If the redemptive promise of God is indeed universal in scope, then what must we say about God, the world, and ourselves in light of this?5 This dogmatic sketch examines what it means to think systematically according to the revelation that God is the one who saves—that is, the one who saves all. Before we can properly turn to that dogmatic project, however, it is first necessary to do some introductory ground-clearing by (a) defining what we mean by “Christian universalism” and (b) presenting the two main problems that a doctrine of universal salvation must overcome.

Defining Universalism: A Typology

Universalism is an ambiguous concept that requires clarification. Since this is a work of Christian theology, I do not use this word with any of its philosophical connotations. I do not have in mind anything related to the metaphysical problem of universals, nor do I use it as an antonym of relativism. Instead, the word as employed here pertains to the theological debate over the nature and scope of salvation. Universalism refers to an account of the God-world relationship that includes all creatures within the scope of God’s reconciling grace—though precisely how we should understand the nature of this grace and the way it includes every creature is what I will explore in later chapters.

What follows is a brief typology of universalisms, drawing on the work of Robin Parry and Christopher Partridge.6 Because every typology trades in abstract categories and ideal types, there is the persistent threat of doing violence to the uncategorizable complexities of history. The typology on offer here is therefore little more than a heuristic device to orient our analysis. No claim is made to comprehensiveness, nor is each category necessarily exclusive of the others. But this typology provides a basic roadmap by which to navigate complex theological waters.

Multiethnic Universalism

A certain kind of multiethnic universalism7 is basic to Christianity, in the sense that God calls people from every nation or people group (in Greek, ethnos) to become followers of Jesus Christ and participants in the community of faith. People from “every tribe and language and people and nation” (Rev 5:9) are included within the family of God. The experience of the early church at Pentecost, as recorded in the Acts of the Apostles, is decisive: whereas salvation under the old law entailed becoming part of a specific people group (viz., Israel), the new community of the Spirit is one that affirms the presence of God equally within each ethnicity and social context. Salvation no longer involves becoming part of Israel, and the mission of God is no longer the diffusion of a specific social and cultural framework. While there are debates over how radically to understand the multiethnicity of Christianity, some account of it is a sine qua non for Christian faith and thus not a matter of serious dispute within theology.

Potential Universalism

“Potential universalism” claims that all people can be saved, but not necessarily that all people will be saved. It affirms that the salvation of all people is a possibility, not an actuality. God’s saving work in Christ is potentially effective for all but not actually effective. It only becomes effective when an individual responds to the gospel in faith. This form of universalism finds its scriptural warrant in 1 Timothy 2:3b–4: “God our Savior . . . desires everyone to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.” While potential universalism takes seriously the description of God’s universal desire, it assumes that God’s will regarding the salvation of all is not efficacious. God can will something to be the case without causing it to be so. The causal “moment” that effects one’s reconciled status before God occurs in a conscious act of the human will.

Parry and Partridge refer to this position as “Arminian universalism” because of the Arminian emphasis on human free will as the basis for individual salvation. The adjective “Arminian” is of course defined in contraposition to “Calvinist,” which emphasizes God’s absolute sovereignty over all creaturely matters. Calvinism, according to this typology, is any position that (a) denies the human will’s capacity to effect one’s salvation and (b) denies that all people will be saved. The result is therefore double predestination: God’s determination in pretemporal eternity that some will be saved and others will be damned. Both “Arminian” and “Calvinist” soteriologies deny universal salvation: the former by virtue of the fact that some freely reject the gospel, and the latter by virtue of the fact that God freely determines that some will not be saved. The Arminian position is thus a potential universalism, while Calvinism is an actual nonuniversalism. What unites both positions is their experiential starting point: they begin with the empirical fact that some people believe and other people do not. On that basis they draw two diametrically opposed positions: the “Arminian” position claims that salvation must depend upon the will of the individual human person, while the “Calvinist” position claims that God must have determined in advance that only some would believe.

I have chosen in my analysis to replace the language of Arminian and Calvinist with the language of potential and actual for the following two reasons. First, the Calvinist-Arminian typology often loses contact with the actual writings of Calvin and Arminius. While it is not inaccurate to see Calvin as a proto-Calvinist or Arminius as a proto-Arminian, it is nevertheless problematic to abstract from their respective writings by creating an ahistorical either-or that has questionable historical merit. Recall that Calvin and Arminius were not contemporaries and consequently never engaged in direct debate. Arminius was a student of Theodore Beza, one of Calvin’s protégés, and one can only understand his work against the background of the infralapsarian-supralapsarian debate that led to the Synod of Dort. Arminianism, for that matter, is more associated with those influenced by his theology—especially the Methodist movement as it developed in North America—rather than with Arminius himself and the Remonstrants. Isolating the issue of free will from the rest of the Remonstrant articles distorts the larger theological context within which the controversy over Arminius’s teachings occurred—a decisively Reformed theological context. Since the issue in question lies at the heart of all Christian theology, we are better served by using terms not derived from a highly specific moment in Protestant church history.

Actual Universalism

The third type of universalism refers broadly to those positions most people associate with the term. These are soteriologies that entail the actual salvation of al...

Table of contents

• Prologue
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Chapter 2: Soteriocentrism
• Chapter 3: The Act of Salvation
• Chapter 4: The Agent of Salvation
• Chapter 5: The Site of Salvation
• Chapter 6: The Space of Salvation
• Chapter 7: The God of Salvation
• Bibliography