Confession is enough. According to Holy Scripture becoming a Christian requires the following:

⁵ For Moses writes about the righteousness which is of the law, “The man who does those things shall live by them.” ⁶ But the righteousness of faith speaks in this way, “Do not say in your heart, ‘Who will ascend into heaven?’ ” (that is, to bring Christ down from above) ⁷ or, “ ‘Who will descend into the abyss?’ ” (that is, to bring Christ up from the dead). ⁸ But what does it say? “The word is near you, in your mouth and in your heart” (that is, the word of faith which we preach): ⁹ that if you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead, you will be saved. ¹⁰ For with the heart one believes unto righteousness, and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation. ¹¹ For the Scripture says, “Whoever believes on Him will not be put to shame.” ¹² For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek, for the same Lord over all is rich to all who call upon Him. ¹³ For “whoever calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.” –Romans 10.5-13

And there is a theological ground to this that is rarely to never discussed or acknowledged. When we reflect on the theo-logic implicate to the Incarnation of God, what we start to see is that God in Christ has freely chosen our humanity for His. In this assumption of our humanity He does for us what we could never do for ourselves; given our incurved predilection to seek first our kingdom and our rightness. He chooses what is best for us; what we were created for; He chooses the life of the Triune God for us, and re-conciles us to Eden lost into the Greater recreation of Jerusalem restored. In other words, and this is the Calvinist aspect of the Evangelical, because of our sub-human totally depraved statuses we could never seek God first; so, He has freely chosen to say Yes for us. It is this doctrine of the vicarious humanity of Christ that informs everything I say, do, and think as a Christian.

Here is the Athanasian Creed which articulates the significance of the Incarnation in regard to eternal life obtaining for each of us:

But it is necessary for eternal salvation that one also believe in the incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ faithfully. Now this is the true faith: That we believe and confess that our Lord Jesus Christ, God’s Son, is both God and human, equally. He is God from the essence of the Father, begotten before time; and he is human from the essence of his mother, born in time; completely God, completely human, with a rational soul and human flesh; equal to the Father as regards divinity, less than the Father as regards humanity. Although he is God and human, yet Christ is not two, but one. He is one, however, not by his divinity being turned into flesh, but by God’s taking humanity to himself. He is one, certainly not by the blending of his essence, but by the unity of his person. For just as one human is both rational soul and flesh, so too the one Christ is both God and human. He suffered for our salvation; he descended to hell; he arose from the dead; he ascended to heaven; he is seated at the Father’s right hand; from there he will come to judge the living and the dead. At his coming all people will arise bodily and give an accounting of their own deeds. Those who have done good will enter eternal life, and those who have done evil will enter eternal fire.[1]

We might want to quibble with the idea of the performance based understanding of salvation that the last clause makes things sound like; but in a theosis theory of salvation, we might also want to frame this in the Luther-esque understanding of a ‘bad tree producing bad fruit’ and a ‘good tree producing good.’ The point being, the Incarnation is the key logic that should stand behind any theory of salvation.

TF Torrance eloquently articulates these truths in regard to salvation, and its Christological conditioning this way:

God loves you so utterly and completely that he has given himself for you in Jesus Christ his beloved Son, and has thereby pledged his very being as God for your salvation. In Jesus Christ God has actualised his unconditional love for you in your human nature in such a once for all way, that he cannot go back upon it without undoing the Incarnation and the Cross and thereby denying himself. Jesus Christ died for you precisely because you are sinful and utterly unworthy of him, and has thereby already made you his own before and apart from your ever believing in him. He has bound you to himself by his love in a way that he will never let you go, for even if you refuse him and damn yourself in hell his love will never cease. Therefore, repent and believe in Jesus Christ as your Lord and Saviour.[2]

In order to press this further let me refer us to my friend, Jason Goroncy. Here is something he wrote in his chapter for our first Evangelical Calvinism book. He is detailing what this Christ-conditioned lens of salvation looks like; in particular, as that was developed in the soteriology of the Scot, John McLeod Campbell (someone TF Torrance admires, among other Scottish theologians):

While Western orthodoxy has mostly stressed the Godward side of the atonement, Campbell laid the weight on the creaturely side, following Anselm: “None therefore but God can make this reparation . . . Yet, none should make it save a man, otherwise man does not make amends.” Campbell recognized that an adequate repentance by those disabled by sin, while required, was morally impossible, and therefore if such were to be offered it would have to be by God, albeit from our side—that is, God in fallen flesh. This is because, Campbell argued, genuine repentance involves seeing the sin (and sinners) “with God’s eyes,”11 viewing broken humanity from within, feeling the deep sorrow  that sin creates and confessing the righteousness of God’s judgment upon it. As R. C. Moberly recalls, sin “has blunted the self’s capacity for entire hatred of sin, and has blunted it once for all.” Only one, therefore, who could see things as they really are could make an adequate confession both of God’s righteousness and of human sin. Such confession is not made in order to avoid sin’s consequences but precisely that sin’s consequences may be embraced in all their dreadfulness, “meeting the cry of these sins for judgment, and the wrath due to them, absorbing and exhausting that divine wrath in that adequate confession and perfect response on the part of man.”

Genuine repentance and confession for “The sin of His brethren” would have to come from one who, as it were, stood on God’s side in the human dock.14 What was impossible for sinners was possible for this man who in the fullness of the hypostatic union penetrated into the depths of our humanity to see sin as God sees it, and to condemn sin as God condemns it, and yet do so from our side and as our head. That is, in “The High Priest of redeemed humanity” such confession and condemnation of sin happened not only with “great sorrow” but from the side of sin. So Campbell: “This confession as to its nature, must have been a perfect Amen in humanity to the judgment of God on the side of man. Such an Amen was due in the truth of things. He who was the Truth could not be in humanity and not utter it—and it was necessarily a first step in dealing with the Father on our behalf. He who would intercede for us must begin with confessing our sins.”

Christ’s “perfect Amen in humanity to the judgment of God” has value for humanity insofar as Christ, ‘spiritually speaking . . . is the human race, made sin for the race, and acting for it in a way so inclusively total, that all mortal confessions, repentances, sorrows, are fitly acted by him in our behalf. His divine Sonship in our humanity is charged in the offering thus to God of all which the guilty world itself should offer,” as Horace Bushnell notes. In offering that perfect response from the depths of humanity Christ “absorbs” the full realization of God’s judgment against sin. Standing as God, Christ knows “a perfect sorrow” regarding sin. And, standing with no “personal consciousness of sin” but fully clad in fallen flesh, Christ is able to offer “a perfect repentance” that is required from humanity’s side offering that perfect “Amen” to God’s mind concerning sin. With this response—even in the midst of Calvary’s darkness—God re-speaks those words first heard over Jordan’s waters: “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.” And in response, humanity cries out “Our Father, hallowed be thy name.”[3]

Goroncy helps fill things out for us. The most important aspect to grab onto is how the logic of the Incarnation is brought to its soteriological conclusion. In other words, and I think this is an inescapable conclusion, if the eternal Word of God became human, His humanity becomes the fully ‘in-stead’ humanity for us. Not as a cipher or instrument, per se, but as the ‘personalising humanity’ that genuinely gives us space, in our own particularity, to be human before God; that is, human in and from the recreated/resurrected humanity of Jesus’s priestly and vicarious humanity for us. This is the Word of God’s Grace; it is Christ become human and in this downward trajectory He unites us to an upward vector that He has always already and eternally shared in glory with His Father by the bond of the Holy Spirit.

Conclusion

I still have Kanye West’s conversion on my mind. I have been shocked, once again, by how much apparent confusion there is ‘out there’ in regard to what Christian salvation actually entails. Kanye, like all of us, has an antecedent voice, a voice that has said, and continues to say Yes to the Father for Him. It is this that gives substance and heft to West’s confession of faith before the world; it is the confession of Jesus’s faith being echoed in and through the vocal cords of Kanye’s voice—through every Christian’s voice. This is the miracle and mystery of salvation, and it is one we should rejoice in whenever and in whomever we see it obtain. We are seeing the miracle of God becoming human borne witness to; not directly, but indirectly as we someone else come to the realization that they are now participants in the plenitude of the Triune Life. This is the Evangel, and it has already succeeded in West’s life, just as sure as Jesus’s Yes can never be turned into a No.

[1] Source.

[2] T. F. Torrance, The Mediation of Christ, 94.

[3] Jason Goroncy, “Tha mi a’ toirt fainear dur gearan:” J. McLeod Campbell and P.T. Forsyth on the Extent of Christ’s Vicarious Ministry,” in eds. Myk Habets and Bobby Grow, Evangelical Calvinism: Essays Resourcing the Continuing Reformation of the Church (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2012), 255-57.