In the past I often used to write about the relationship between works and salvation; usually the context had to do with the whole Arminian and/or [neo] Puritan context. Well today we visited a church (not the Presbyterian one) that we once were “members” of for at least a couple of years. This church has undergone quite a bit of change over the years, in fact they have installed a new younger pastor, who has now (or is) transitioned into the lead pastor role taking over for the founding pastor of 38 years (who is actually still present at the church in a new and behind the scenes role). The sermon was taken from Revelation 3:1-6 which says:

“To the angel of the church in Sardis write: These are the words of him who holds the seven spirits[b] of God and the seven stars. I know your deeds; you have a reputation of being alive, but you are dead. 2 Wake up! Strengthen what remains and is about to die, for I have found your deeds unfinished in the sight of my God. 3 Remember, therefore, what you have received and heard; hold it fast, and repent. But if you do not wake up, I will come like a thief, and you will not know at what time I will come to you. 4 Yet you have a few people in Sardis who have not soiled their clothes. They will walk with me, dressed in white, for they are worthy. 5 The one who is victorious will, like them, be dressed in white. I will never blot out the name of that person from the book of life, but will acknowledge that name before my Father and his angels. 6 Whoever has ears, let them hear what the Spirit says to the churches.

It becomes quickly apparent how the issue of works and salvation might be front in center in covering the correspondence provided by this text. The way the pastor chose to deal with vss. 5 and 6 was to engage it through emphasizing the fact that we have security in Christ; but only IF we do certain things. It is not enough, the pastor exhorted, to simply believe in Christ, but we also must have good works (whatever those might be) alongside our profession of faith, or we are evidencing spiritual death. So if we want to be secure, essentially, we must not only have belief and profession, we also must have certain concordant actions, or we have a dead faith (he cf. Jms 2.17 here).

Admittedly, this is a kind of tenuous thing in scripture. There is no doubt that doing good works is an important aspect of what it means to be a Christian, but our security ‘in Christ’ cannot be contingent upon what we do, if so, then all we have admitted is that we ultimately and theo-logically believe that salvation is a result of my faithfulness instead of the faithfulness of Christ for me (for us). This issue never really gets all that easy to nuance, especially from the pulpit, but it does indeed require nuance. For example, the psychological impact today’s sermon had on me was to cause me to look to myself prior to looking to Christ; when I know the intention of the pastor was to cause us to look to Christ first. But in my estimation, the way he handled this text, and its underlying theological informers, failed.

Karl Barth offers a better way to consider the kind of theological anthropology that would have been good to consider today by the pastor; Barth writes:

[T]he answer is that we ourselves are directly summoned, that we are lifted up, that we are awakened to our own truest being as life and act, that we are set in motion by the fact that in that one man God has made Himself our peacemaker and the giver and gift of our salvation. By it we are made free for Him. By it we are put in the place which comes to us where our salvation (really ours) can come to us from Him (really from Him). This actualisation of His redemptive will by Himself opens up to us the one true possibility of our own being. Indeed, what remains to us of life and activity in the face of this actualisation of His redemptive will by Himself can only be one thing. This one thing does not mean the extinguishing of our humanity, but its establishment. It is not a small thing, but the greatest of all. It is not for us a passive presence as spectators, but our true and highest activation—the magnifying of His grace which has its highest and most profound greatness in the fact that God has made Himself man with us, to make our cause His own, and as His own to save it from disaster and to carry it through to success. The genuine being of man as life and activity, the “We with God,” is to affirm this, to admit that God is right, to be thankful for it, to accept the promise and the command which it contains, to exist as the community, and responsibly in the community, of those who know that this is all that remains to us, but that it does remain to us and that for all men everything depends upon its coming to pass. And it is this “We with God” that is meant by the Christian message in its central “God with us,” when it proclaims that God Himself has taken our place, that He Himself has made peace between Himself and us, that by Himself he has accomplished our salvation, I.e., our participation in His being. [Karl Barth CD IV/I, p. 12]

And Thomas Torrance follows in Barth’s wake when he writes:

[. . .] But this economic condescension has its counterpart in a movement ofprokope. The fathers have in mind here the Lukan account of the obedience and development of the child Jesus who ‘cut his way forward’ (prokopte) as he grew in wisdom and favour with God and with man (Luke 2.52). In other words Jesus’ growth in wisdom was regarded as opening up a way for man to rise to true knowledge of the Father. Jesus Christ is not only the Truth who has accommodated himself to us in order to reveal himself, not only the Word become flesh, but he is also Man hearing and obeying that Word, apprehending that Truth throughout his life on earth, so that he provides for us in his own obedient sonship within our human nature the Way whereby we are carried up to knowledge of God the Father. ‘We understand by Way that prokope to perfection which is made stage by stage, and in regular order, through the works of righteousness and the illumination of knowledge, ever longing after what is before, and reaching forth unto those things which remain, until we shall have reached the blessed end, the knowledge of God, which the Lord through himself bestows on them that have trusted in him. For our Lord is an essentially good Way, where erring and straying are unknown, to that which is essentially good, to the Father. For no one, he says, comes to the Father but through me. Such is our way up to God through the Son’ (De Spiritu Sancto I8.I8). [T. F. Torrance, Theology in Reconstruction,(Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1966), 38-9]

What both Barth and Torrance would have provided this pastor today is a theological grounding for thinking about humanity and humanity’s relationship to God. Instead of starting with my responsibility, and/or making salvation and my security in salvation contingent upon my choice and act for God, what both Barth and Torrance do is make salvation and security contingent upon God’s choice and act for me (for us) in his own grace shaped life actualised in his dearly beloved Son. Once this ground is laid, solidified, and established (I Cor. 3.11), then discussing Revelation 3 and other such passages take on a clarity wherein the listener or reader does not think in terms of conditional salvation on their part, but through the lens and unconditional nature of salvation in the finished work of salvation in Jesus Christ for us.

Do we have a responsibility to act and repent? Indeed. But my salvation is not contingent upon the ground I clear prior to realizing this salvation (like a kind of Puritan prepatory faith–which is what today’s sermon really sounded like to me, albeit in evangelical and passive-aggressive kind of tone), it is contingent upon the ground and relationship that has always already been the reality before the Father and the Son by the Holy Spirit for me (for us). This is an important nuance that needs to be appreciated and thought through before entering the pulpit and exhorting parishioners to take this kind of conditional prepatory work upon themselves. It is the humanity of Christ for us that serves as the foundation of our salvation and humanity; he has penetrated through the depths of our dead selves in a way that he only can. And his breaking in on our humanity is something that is constantly realized for us, in and through his humanity for us.

The theological-exegetical consideration in this discussion revolves around the relationship between the objective ground and the subjective ground of salvation. As we can see this touches upon issues having to do with theological-anthropology as well as soteriology and harmartiology (sin). The question becomes how we understand our role to God’s role in salvation. If we see humanity grounded, first, in the humanity of Christ for us; then we won’t try to conceive of this relationship that makes salvation contingent upon what “I” do in relation to appropriating salvation for me. Instead, we will understand that Christ’s humanity (which is subjectivity, objectified) becomes the basis by which we think about the contingency of salvation. If it contingent upon his humanity for us, then “no worries!” If salvation and security in that salvation becomes contingent upon my humanity and my act, then we have every reason in the world to worry, every day, of every minute of everyday.

Barth and Torrance well understood this issue, and it would serve this pastor we listened to today, to re-consider the ground from which he communicated this text today.

PS. This also illustrated for me today the import of theological exegesis. It does not simply work to pretend that we can affirm the logic of the Trinity and Incarnation (hypostatic union)–which almost every North American Evangelical does–and then in the next moment not allow these basic realities to inform and impinge upon our occasional exegesis of various texts (like Revelation 3). It is high time that Christian pastors really start to become more rigorous in their exegesis of the text. And it is high time that Evangelical pastors understand how important it is to be consistent with the catholic faith they say they affirm. It is time for there to be more consistency, and less dissonance.