True Faith and Holistic Salvation

What is salvation? Redemption from punishment? Living forever? Could it be more?
What is true faith? Is it simply believing the gospel? What is the gospel?
These are all important questions that should be asked from time to time to help us broaden and deepen our understanding of our faith.

Some people say that believing in Jesus' atonement and resurrection is what gets you your ticket to heaven. That whole statement is full of gaps.

When Jesus or the apostles talk about faith, it isn't just faith in the power of God to forgive sins, although this is very important. Jesus only taught forgiveness of sins as a part of a composite of teachings commonly referred to as the message of the Kingdom of God. I think Jesus is asking us to believe in more than just salvation from legal condemnation. Jesus was (and is) inviting people into a better way of life. When Jesus taught the beatitudes and about bearing the fruit of love, he was speaking of the way we enter into by faith.

Many times faith is metaphorically spoken of as sowing seeds or abiding and bearing fruit. Faith is believing what Jesus says and then choosing to enter into his way of life. It isn't just about a ticket to heaven, but about representing paradise in God's earthly kingdom right now. It is about doing his will on earth by loving others in his name.

The letters of James and 1 John are great arguments for this. According to James and John, we know we are in the faith if we love one another. According to Paul, we walk in the spirit, not the flesh. The spirit is grace and the flesh is law. We do not live by a set of rules and regulations, but we operate according to grace and love, not judging (in the condemnation sense) but loving and submitting and forgiving one another.

Salvation is holistic when it integrates both the work of the cross for us and the work of the cross in us. We must enter into a transformation by love and grace.

This isn't to say that simply following the way of Jesus is good enough. Forgiveness of sins only comes through the atonement of the cross, and transformation is essential to our paths.

The best way to know whether or not you know Jesus is not by simply asking yourself if you've believed in the gospel, but by examining yourself to see if you are loving others in the way of Jesus. I am not saying we should live in fear, but that transformation is the mark of a believer, and that loving others is the mark of transformation.

It's funny how we come to God praising him for his love and asking for his joy and peace, and yet isolate ourselves from our neighbors sometimes. According to John, loving God isn't a personal, individualized experience; it means loving others (1 John 4:20-21). If we want to experience God and live and move and breathe and have our being within his love and grace and peace and joy, we need to do good to others daily. This will really help us to understand God better and what his love and grace are really all about. This is where true joy and faith are. Paul calls the fruit of the spirit love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. It is interesting how he groups all those together in one fruit (and contrasts them to the works of the flesh - again, flesh vs. spirit, law vs. grace). The feelings and experiences (joy, peace) are intertwined with good deeds (being kind, faithfulness which is perpetual faith, being gentle, being patient, etc). It is also interesting how according to John 15, faith is abiding in Christ in order to bear fruit. In other words, true faith means following Jesus' way of life which is loving others in gentleness and humility in order to experience God's peace and joy.

Thoughts from Pagan Christianity

Here’s my first response to Viola’s exhaustive masterpiece: Western Christianity is starting to look like the Twilight Zone in comparison (or should I say, contrast) to the primitive Christianity of the first century (the time of the apostles and New Testament documents).

The Twilight Zone. That’s massive. That’s scary. One of the greatest truths I’ve gained (or relearned or supported further) from this mind-blowing array of information is, in the famous revolutionary words of Rob Bell (to give credit), simply this: everything is spiritual. While and where there has always existed a false separation of the secular and the sacred in Judaic and Pagan religions and philosophies (even New Age to a degree), primitive Christianity flipped this idea on its head which was one of the things that made it such a countercultural revolution (which it isn’t now so much). For the early Christians, there were no sacred spaces, because everywhere and everything was sacred for them (as they were themselves the “House of God”, not a building), and there was no priestly system because every believer was a priest (as well as a child of God). Now you may say, “But Judaism shares the same God and scriptures, therefore their system cannot be false”. Good question, glad you asked.

Within the Jewish system, the separation of sacred and venerated spaces and objects from the non-sacred was (along with the sacrificial system) a false reality of symbols and shadows. Animal sacrifices didn’t take away sin (as the book of Hebrews says), they foreshadowed Christ’s sacrifice, the reality and substance. The separation of sacred and secular (if they even had such a word) was to symbolize the separation of darkness from light and the divine from its creation. However, while the Old Testament saw God as dwelling in a tabernacle, the New Testament sees God as being in everything, but especially in believers.

Unfortunately, Western Christianity has made church a special sacred time where you act different than on Monday when actually the early Christians of the first century got together in each other’s homes and interacted intimately and with spontaneity (like a gathering of friends, which it was). The Lord’s Supper was a full meal of happiness and celebration (not a mystical, magic ritual, or ritualistic “solemn remembrance”). In conclusion, I would encourage you to climb out of your neat and nice comfort zone and read this book, considering the in-your-face facts (but with grace, of course). Maybe then we can start to climb back out of the Twilight Zone.

Colossians 2:16-17

Hebrews 8:3-6

Hebrews 10:1