I get this sense that there are many Christians operating with a juridical or forensic theory of salvation. There is this sort of pervasive idea that when a person dies, or even lives, a person who has believed on the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, that this person MUST be living a victorious Christian life or their respective salvation is suspect. If the reader is aware of the history and development of salvation systems, though, they would be more theological-critical than this. Some are aware and continue to articulate theories of salvation that offer a juridical understanding of God’s grace; this understanding, as noted, leads people to operate with a performative understanding of salvation. In order to creatively think this through further let me offer an imaginative riff on the famed Rich Man and Lazarus passage found in Luke 16.

¹⁹ “There was a rich man who was clothed in purple and fine linen and who feasted sumptuously every day. ²⁰ And at his gate was laid a poor man named Lazarus, covered with sores, ²¹ who desired to be fed with what fell from the rich man’s table. Moreover, even the dogs came and licked his sores. ²² The poor man died and was carried by the angels to Abraham’s side. The rich man also died and was buried, ²³ and in Hades, being in torment, he lifted up his eyes and saw Abraham far off and Lazarus at his side. ²⁴ And he called out, ‘Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus to dip the end of his finger in water and cool my tongue, for I am in anguish in this flame.’ ²⁵ But Abraham said, ‘Child, remember that you in your lifetime received your good things, and Lazarus in like manner bad things; but now he is comforted here, and you are in anguish. ²⁶ And besides all this, between us and you a great chasm has been fixed, in order that those who would pass from here to you may not be able, and none may cross from there to us.’ ²⁷ And he said, ‘Then I beg you, father, to send him to my father’s house— ²⁸ for I have five brothers—so that he may warn them, lest they also come into this place of torment.’ ²⁹ But Abraham said, ‘They have Moses and the Prophets; let them hear them.’ ³⁰ And he said, ‘No, father Abraham, but if someone goes to them from the dead, they will repent.’ ³¹ He said to him, ‘If they do not hear Moses and the Prophets, neither will they be convinced if someone should rise from the dead.’”

I am going to disregard the broader context and direct point of this parable in order to illustrate another; a point that is in line with what I was referring to previously. The juridically oriented Christian, the one who functions with a self-performance understanding of salvation—think of Federal/Covenantal theology, 5 Point Calvinism, Arminianism, so on and so forth—would look at the outwardly righteous, outwardly “victorious” (think morally) and have total confidence that these people were now in the presence of the LORD (and they may well be, and probably are); but then, on the other hand, they would look at the poor beleaguered soul, and conclude that such a person was in the torment of hell. They might look at Lazarus and wonder: ‘what poor choices did this unbecoming person make in their lives in order to lead them to the deplorable status they lived in prior to death.’ And then they would walk away self-justified, like Job’s friends, only to find out that Jesus was actually with the bruised-reed Lazarus, and not the rich man (upwardly mobile and successful) after all. Such self-justified people arrive at these wrong conclusions precisely because they have artificially imposed a foreign theory of salvation onto the text and reality of Holy Scripture.

God’s Grace is much more latitudinarian, much more sufficient and universal than the self-righteous expect or even want it to be. I would argue, and have for many years, that classical Calvinism (and Arminianism) in all of its iterations, artificially foists an alien framework of salvation onto the text and reality of Scripture. It does this precisely because it has adopted a wrong doctrine of God, wherein God is thought of from a substance metaphysic that reduces His relation to the world to a mercantile contractual relationship grounded in deterministic decrees (decretum absolutum). And yet Jesus came to save the sick, down-trodden, and broken; the Lazarus’s and Rons among us. He came for you and me. The second we lose sight of the expansiveness of God’s Grace we have only submitted to some sort of Pelagian frame wherein we want to attribute our salvation to our performance one way or the other—even if we logic-chop in an attempt to work around this implication.